Navigating The Destructive Impact of Generative AI on Academia and Education

Abstract: This paper investigates how generative AI’s ability to produce knowledge-like outputs reshapes the ways knowledge, evidence, and truth claims are created and evaluated and what challenges this creates for education and research. Addressing these issues is critical in that the basic function of academia depends on reliable methods for producing and evaluating knowledge, and generative AI may change how evidence is created, interpreted, and trusted within these institutions and thus for the broader society. We also note a tendency for the centralization of epistemic authority due to these technologies, which in tandem with increasing political and ideological concerns over maintaining orthodoxies of belief portend unique challenges to the very idea of the university. The emerging modalities of AI can be seen as both a reflection and continuation of a reductive instrumentalization of knowledge and a centralized control of opinion formation, and we argue that the entrenchment of contemporary generative AI in our institutions of knowledge-production is likely to reproduce such structural objectives or intentionalities. We finally reflect on some possible approaches towards navigating the situation with special regard to educational reform and innovation.