This is a republishing from the Medium blog I (Kim Crawley) just wrote and published: https://medium.com/@kim_crawley/im-a-professor-literally-risking-my-own-life-to-fight-the-menace-of-gen-ai-destroying-education-6b3c596f55ce
For the TL;DR version, scroll down five paragraphs.
In December 2018, Greta Thunberg was invited to speak to the UN. She was getting really frustrated at this point. Because no matter how much media attention she got in the past few months, people in positions of power in governments around the world were refusing to actually do something effective to stop the ever worsening cliamte disaster (otherwise known as climate change) destroying the viability of the planet for human beings. No matter how much well grounded scientific research she presented that showed large sections of the Earth will become unhabitable by humans really soon and also significantly reduce global food production… they’d just pat her little head and pay lip service.
“I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children, maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”
If you think Thunberg was being hyperbolic, here’s a massive collection of scientific research about how climate disaster is largely manmade, directly caused by accumlated carbon emissions over the past couple of centuries of capitalism and industrialization. And how much of the world is becoming too damn hot, sea levels too high, and way too many weather disasters occuring to be compatible with human life:
https://archive.org/details/ArchiveIt-Collection-5534
In this article, I’m going to do for the threat of Gen AI destroying education and academia what Greta Thunberg has been doing with the manmade climate disaster crisis. College and university faculty, academic administration, and ordinary civilians must take action right now. Speak out, like I am.
TL;DR
As Greta made fighting climate disaster her life, I’m making fighting Gen AI my life.
And my life is literally on the line, no exaggeration.
As of the time of my writing this on August 10th, 2025, I’m still a cybersecurity professor at the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT). But I’m not a tenured baby boomer professor. I’m on the verge of poverty, and I frequently lose sleep at night over how I’m going to pay my rent. And I’m starting to see signs that OPIT is trying to get rid of me because I’m outspoken in my opposition to Gen AI.
In May 2025, I founded the only organization dedicated to fighting Gen AI that has actually raised money to financially support people who are being made poor by Gen AI, Stop Gen AI. You can find out what we’re all about through our website: StopGenAI.com. Making a donation to us or buying our fundraising merchandise (we have t-shirts, mugs, and tote bags featuring real human artists!) would be a big help: stopgenai.com/fundraising. So would spreading the word about our organization. We are already getting some media from small news outlets here and there, but we could really use your help to share our existence and our website on your social media. You can also learn how to join our org on our homepage.
But because I will likely be fired from OPIT for my opposition to Gen AI, and because I have lost so much income from my various corporate overlords in the tech industry thinking I can be replaced by Gen AI, I need your direct help to be able to pay my rent and buy food. Denying someone of food and housing is literally a way to kill them… we have no social safety net anymore and I have no family to help me. If you can afford to pitch in a little to my new Ko-Fi, it would help me to stay alive so I can keep fighting Gen AI as a political activist, and so I can do the work to help my org raise money so other people can survive too. If you can’t afford to pitch in $5, $20, $100, then please share. Share this blog and share my Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/kimatstopgenai Thank you!
People who have quit OPIT staff have confided to me that morale there really sucks, and that’s why some people are leaving.
OPIT advertises their ability to help students get good jobs!
But in embracing Gen AI, OPIT is actually contributing to the destruction of the workforce. More on that later, with citations…
/ TL;DR
To summarize, colleges and universities around the world are starting to push Gen AI, which is intended to replace human labour (under capitalism, those of us not born into wealth must be paid for our labour in order to survive!), and to replace human thinking.
I have some theories about why colleges, universities, and K-12 schools are pushing for students and faculty to use the evil Gen AI torment nexus instead of actually thinking and actually learning:
- Persuasive ed tech vendor sales reps, from the biggest evils at the top (i.e. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google), to the smaller evils near the middle (i.e. TurnItIn, Grammarly) are using their charm, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and appeals to profitability to convince schools that they either need their Gen AI “solutions” to detect when students are cheating on assigments, and faculty are cheating on their research. Because obviously students and teachers delegating their work to the bot means they didn’t actually do the work, therefore invalidating academia. Concurrently, said vendors are also often selling the idea that Gen AI should be used to do schoolwork. “We’re the problem and the solution to the problem we caused! Send us money! Send us data!”
- Corporate interests in control of academic institutions ultimately want to pay fewer and fewer teachers, professors, and researchers to do work. They would really want to stop paying anyone to do thinking, research, writing, and teaching work. 100% of school revenue should go to paying for corporate executives and shareholder dividends! Let’s take paying academic workers out of the equation! “We’ll start slowly, bit by bit. Teacher by teacher!”
This is literally apocalyptic. The crisis caused by corporate greed has already begun. Most teachers and faculty have either drunk the Elon Musk/Sam Altman Gen AI kool-aid, or they’ve decided to stay quiet about the horrors of Gen AI because they want to keep their livelihoods. Students are already using ChatGPT and other LLMs to do their work for them. So are some very unethical professors. And some of us are already losing our jobs and becoming poor.
Unlike the vast majority, I’m speaking out publicly because my conscience and my dignity cannot handle staying silent and keeping up the lie. And for that, I now may become homeless.
Based on my most recent OPIT communications, I’m still scheduled to teach my enterprise cybersecurity course when OPIT’s new semester begins around September 14th. But this year, OPIT is forcing us to sign up with TurnItIn to check all student work for Gen AI usage.
I find that to be tremendously insulting, on multiple levels:
Using bots to detect bots is like when alcoholics think the best hangover cure is to drink more alcohol in the morning. This is trying to use the poison to cure the poison. It’s absolutely fucking ridiculous. OPIT is actively encouraging a world where students use Gen AI to do their work for them (they are officially against that, but they also have an “Introduction to Prompt Engineering” course, an ridiculous thing to make a course out of, and they hype Gen AI in many other ways, pushing the horrifying “Gen AI is inevitable” myth), and then faculty uses Gen AI to detect if students are using Gen AI.
– Research shows that bullshit fosters distrust in the classroom between students and teachers, which erodes education ever more. “Distrust was a marker that we observed of both student-to-teacher relationships and student-to-student relationships. Learners shared fears of being left behind if other students in their classes used chatbots to get better grades. This resulted in emotional distance and wariness among students. Indeed, our findings reflect other reports that indicate the mere possibility that a student might have used a generative AI tool is now undercutting trust across the classroom. Students are as anxious about baseless accusations of AI use as they are about being caught using it.”
– Human beings who are well educated and have high literacy skills (one would expect most professors to fall into this category) are better at detecting Gen AI slop than software like TurnItIn (or any of the other SaaS being pushed onto schools for the purposes of Gen AI detection). See this study, Human intelligence can safeguard against artificial intelligence: individual differences in the discernment of human from AI texts by J. M. Chein, S. A. Martinez & A. R. Baron. “When human and AI-generated comments were considered side-by-side, judgement accuracy was comparatively high (78%). This high accuracy rate for comments was obtained without prior training or matching of materials to participants’ domain expertise.”
Evan Edinger’s recent YouTube video, “I Can Spot AI Writing Instantly — Here’s How You Can Too” is an example of some of the many ways that well educated people with high English language fluency spot Gen AI.
– LLM Gen AI will never be able to replicate human writing well because LLMs by their very nature don’t understand the meaning of words, only the statistical mathematical patterns of how people have used words. Computational linguist and linguistics professor Emily Bender, a top expert on LLMs: “Bender emphasized the difference between natural languages and the text generated by large language models, hence terming it a ‘stochastic parrot.’ LLMs stitch together linguistic forms in a pattern-based manner, similar to the imitative tendencies of a parrot, Bender said. By contrast, natural language is symbolic, pairing form and meaning. ‘When we are using language, we usually can’t experience the form without the meaning, because we interpret it so fast,’ Bender said. ‘On the other hand, the only thing a large language model can learn is about form, sequences of letters and punctuation, and what’s likely to go next.’”
– TurnItIn and other SaaS that’s marketed as being able to detect Gen AI is actually pretty shitty at it. MIT says: “In response to these concerns, some companies have developed ‘AI detection’ software. This software aims to flag AI-generated content in student work. However, AI detection software is far from foolproof, in fact, it has high error rates and can lead instructors to falsely accuse students of misconduct (Edwards, 2023; Fowler, 2023). OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, even shut down their own AI detection software because of its poor accuracy.”
– The enormous environmental harm caused by Gen AI also makes me want to avoid ‘AI detection’ software like TurnItIn. I shudder at the thought of burning down a forest and draining a lake to check if a student has been burning down a forest and draining a lake. Horrifying.
My environmental concerns aren’t hyperbole. Gen AI literally burns down forests and drains lakes, see the environmental research citations further in this piece.
OPIT apparently expects me to teach in September, and yet they have removed all references to me on their website.
Proof that I am/was OPIT faculty:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.opit.com/faculty-list/kim-crawley/
Screenshots from my email and Canvas:
https://stopgenai.com/evidence-of-kim-crawleys-employment-as-opit-faculty-in-2024-2025
They are forcing me to use TurnItIn. I absoutely refuse. I will detect Gen AI with my goddamn brain:
Gen AI is destroying the planet. This is where my interests and Greta Thunberg’s interests merge.
This and other research citations later on in this piece are taken from the Questioning AI Resources List that us concerned human beings are sharing around. I’ve uploaded it to Stop Gen AI’s website so we have our own mirror of it: https://stopgenai.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Questioning-AI-Resource-List-.docx You may also enjoy this other list of citations: https://stopgenai.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Why-AI-is-doomed-sources-5.pdf
Gen AI is killing the planet; the water you drink, the air you breathe:
• AI is taking water from the desert: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/ai-water-climate-microsoft/677602/?gift=iWa_iB9lkw4UuiWbIbrWGSgF7Etgr_BhmgDCCZVB-xA
• Water usage in Iowa: https://www.kcci.com/article/ai-technology-behind-chatgpt-built-in-west-des-moines-iowa-microsoft/45081445
• AI contributing to water shortages: https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/
• AI triples emissions from data centers: https://www.techradar.com/pro/generative-ai-triples-the-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-data-centers
• Georgia was about to retire coal plants, then came the data centers: https://grist.org/energy/georgia-was-about-to-retire-coal-plants-then-came-the-data-cen/
• Ireland’s data centers overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/ireland-datacentres-overtake-electricity-use-of-all-homes-combined-figures-show
• AI draining power grids in AZ: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/23/arizona-data-centers-navajo-power-aps-srp/
• Your utility bills are subsidizing Facebook and Amazon (data centers that power AI are increasing consumers’ electric bills): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI
• Elon Musk’s AI company is polluting Memphis, making residents sick (this could also go in the racism section): https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
• Google is hiding how much energy is used by AI: https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/
• Comprehensive report on GenAI energy use from MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/
◦ Creating a 5 second AI video is like running a microwave for an hour: https://mashable.com/article/energy-ai-worse-than-we-thought
• Growing demand for natural gas power plants in Texas to power AI (this is undoing major progress on transition away from fossil fuels), officials are rubber stamping without giving due consideration to Clean Air Act: https://www.desmog.com/2025/06/12/texas-ai-artificial-intelligence-demand-100-gas-plants-data-centers-pollution-eip-report/
• Meta’s “black hole of energy use” in Louisiana: https://www.404media.co/a-black-hole-of-energy-use-metas-massive-ai-data-center-is-stressing-out-a-louisiana-community/
• We will need to accelerate fossil fuel burning in order to power AI without massive power outages due to extreme energy demand: https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-plays-out-worst-case-scenarios-for-us-grid/
• “I can’t drink the water”- life next to an AI data center in Georgia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
◦ Meta data center water usage in Georgia: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-center-water.html
• AI Data Centers in Texas use 465 million gallons of water, residents told to take shorter showers: https://techiegamers.com/texas-data-centers-quietly-draining-water/
• Data centers connected to higher electric bills for many Americans, a massive wealth transfer to big tech companies: https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-fbf213a915fb574a4f3e5baaa7041c3a
Yes, our evil overlords do want to replace you with Gen AI
I’m now struggling to survive (please support my Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/kimatstopgenai) and if you still have a livelihood, yours may be next.
- Goal of AI is to “crash” workers wages according to top AI investor: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-investor-goal-crash-human-wages
- The Age of AI Layoffs is Here: https://qz.com/ai-layoffs-jobs-microsoft-walmart-tech-workers-1851782194
- AI Is Making It Nearly Impossible to Find a Well-Paying Job. Is This the World We Want? https://futurism.com/ai-impossible-find-job
- CEOs Are Publicly Boasting About Reducing Their Workforces With AI https://futurism.com/ceos-boasting-reducing-workforces-ai “The brash and brutally honest tone of executives bragging about headcount reductions is reaching astonishing levels. ‘CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings,’ AI advisor Elijah Clark told Gizmodo recently. ‘As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI.’”
Let’s return to how Gen AI is destroying education. If people like me don’t take a stand, Bachelors and Masters degrees will become absolutely meaningless. Oh, so you “prompted” a bot to do your work, and then a bunch of other bots evaluted your bots?
• Study finds that people who use LLMs to write essays build fewer neural connections and “Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
• Use of AI negatively impacts critical thinking: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
◦ https://advait.org/files/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
◦ AI and cognitive offloading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9329671/pdf/frai-05-908261.pdf
◦ Another study finding association between using AI and lower critical thinking skills. Younger people are doing worse on critical thinking tests than older people because of more cognitive offloading: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
• Kids who use ChatGPT to study do worse on tests: https://www.popsci.com/technology/kids-who-use-chatgpt-as-a-study-assistant-do-worse-on-tests/
• Essay detailing how use of AI in education is problematic and counterproductive (page 25): https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53a4b792e4b073bf214c0e66/t/67ddcdb4e1ee531df076cb82/1742589366973/ICMA_MarchNewsletter_v7+FINAL.pdf
• Privacy concerns re: use of AI in higher ed: https://www.tandcmedia.org/article/2025/01/4800-ai-in-higher-education
• LLM powered bot students are generating chaos at community colleges: https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/04/14/as-bot-students-continue-to-flood-in-community-colleges-struggle-to-respond/
• Reflection on AI in education: https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/the-alternative-to-ai-in-the-classroom
• LLMs are destroying higher education by enabling rampant cheating: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html
• Student demands tuition refund after discovering professor used AI: https://futurism.com/student-professor-chatgpt-tuition
• Guide to GenAI in education that includes definitions of key terms: https://alinautrata.substack.com/p/the-anti-dystopians-guide-to-genai
• AI teacher tools are racially biased when developing plans for students: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/ai-teacher-assistants-promote-racial-bias-study-finds/
“Prompt Engineering”
“Prompt engineering” is the idea that there’s a science to how to write good prompts into ChatGPT, DALL-E, and various other Gen AI implementations to generate text, images, video, and audio. But if there’s a special skill or technique that’s needed to write good “prompts,” as in queries to type into these evil bots to generate what you desire, then how can you at the same time market this bullshit as being accessible to consumers?
OPIT has an “Introduction to Prompt Engineering” course? I definitely threw up in my mouth when I saw that.
I’d call it a “basket weaving course,” except basket weaving is an actually useful skill and doesn’t harm people… unlike Gen AI.
“As for ‘prompt engineer’ though… there is no such thing, and there shouldn’t be. Being able to write clear instructions is not an engineering discipline. It’s not even particular technical knowledge. It simply means that you mastered a human language on a fair level, and you can express yourself in largely unambiguous terms. You can describe what you want. In other words, you know how to speak. Wow, congratulations!
Shall we call lawyers ‘legal engineers” now? Or poets “rhyme engineers”? Let’s take it further, is a cook now a “cooking engineer”? Or a cop a “public safety engineer”?”
Software developer Alexandru Ciobanu:
“So why isn’t it (‘prompt engineering’) engineering? Well, is asking a question ‘engineering’? Excuse me for being pedantic but from what I’ve learned it’s part of the field of ‘philosophy.’ There is no engineering involved. And even if there is “skill” required to formulate a well-structured question for the LLM, that is not an engineering pursuit.
Now, I don’t want to linger on technicalities over the naming of this process. What interests me instead is the amount of knowledge required to formulate these questions and I would guess it’s very little. You see, calling it ‘engineering’ creates wrong expectations. One can argue that it tries to convince people that it’s a marketable skill, a skill that they can use for employment security, and, in some cases give an advantage.
On a related note, the type of questions one asks are intimately tied to the architecture of the underlying model one uses. The alignment process used by each model provider is different and changes over time to make it better at understanding even the vaguest of questions. So this purported ‘skill’ is nothing but a temporary adjustment in how one asks questions, a process that is bound to change often.”
This is all vile. If it was “responsible,” you wouldn’t have to say it, eh?:
So my reward for being a strong critical thinker and a caring human being who doesn’t want people to die from climate disaster, doesn’t want people to die from losing their livelihoods, and doesn’t want the credibility of academia to be destroyed shall be…
Poverty! Then death. Because going without food and shelter leads to death. Social murder, as described by Friedrich Engels in 1845:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
If Victorian Era English is above your reading level or you’re getting cognitively burned out from trying to survive, as I am, social murder is:
Killing someone by denying them what they need to live. Taking away a professor’s livelihood for being a whistleblower is social murder, because under capitalism I need income to buy food and pay for housing.
Please do what you can to keep me alive so I can fight for everyone else.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.