Anxiety is usually different to stress only insofar as it is persistent and remains even after the stressor departs. But AI is apparently ever present, always intertwined with everything... so who knows what I feel. I struggle to really comprehend how unwell I am sometimes because of the erosion of what feels like everything, turbocharged by AI. Since joining an AI-related department 5 years ago, for me at least, everything has become fully infected.
I'm going to lay out some thoughts with the hope maybe this exercise provides something helpful to others, serves as healing for myself, and possibly and eventually places a small pebble on the road to getting us all out of this mess — like Nikhil Suresh says "to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy." Also thanks to those like Lauren Fraser who said that they may be interested in hearing what I am about to regurgitate below.
According to what I have learned living in Western Europe for such a long part of my life (roughly from 18-years-old onwards), I express my feelings just fine when I need to. So while in the UK nobody really cared that my stiff upper lip also switches places with me expressing my feelings when I want to, in the Netherlands my ability to express myself, cry in public, or even just have facial expressions, is fetishised.
This has caused me quite a lot of introspection — and given rise to misunderstandings even in feminist spaces, especially in feminist spaces, because I feel so othered for being able to share. I bristle at how within academia here the natural tendency is to outsource emotional processing from the seniors to the juniors and even more terrifyingly to students. Yes, it's good to cry. It's great to express negative and positive emotions in healthy and appropriate ways. But, and I cannot stress this enough, it's abusive to expect management of our emotions from the people we mentor, supervise, or teach.
Emotions in my new culture, superficially presented as positive to express, are a method and locus of extraction from our more vulnerable colleagues or from our students. The concepts of emotional labour, affective labour, and emotion work are helpful here: simply put, ways of forcing people, usually women, to suppress their own emotional state and act with the goal of making others feel good. In my context, I witness the more powerful, more Germanic, more promoted academics extract emotional labour from those around them. These people jump from no processing of their feelings to vomiting them out on students, for students to mop up, for students to be harmed by the toxicity of their unprocessed nonsense.
Most vitally, if a mentee comes to us with a problem, it is our pastoral duty as academics to address their problem however possible — and not to overshare and centre our own (thematically similar perhaps, but in context irrelevant) problems. This coerces them into providing us with emotional support, subverting the reality of the roles, and creating a topsy-turvy world in which we use opportunities to help others (which in this case is our paid job to do) as therapy sessions for ourselves. Academia operates on a patron system, so the mentee will likely never say: "You cannot do this to me right now. You need to help me with simple words and effective actions. I cannot help you with your problem anyway because I am junior and powerless." In all this emotional manipulation what gets left behind is that they came to us for material help. Shameful.
So, yes, now I am finally myself scared to share. Where am I sending these feelings? And will the receiver feel compelled to care about mine over theirs? From the ADHD choir of voices, or better put the tornado of thoughts in my head emerges the correction: Nah, just spill it. A website is not a classroom. Your readers are not structurally under your thumb. Do not let emotionally stunted people who cannot manage their own emotions — or their own tendency to extract from others under the guise of emotional maturity! — get to you. You have processed the feelings a lot. They might even be useful for some. Just spill it.
You may wonder what this emotional extraction and turmoil has to do with AI. It has everything to do with AI. Or rather AI has everything to do with it. Emotional extraction and oppression is enacted by AI — and these forces run on similar lines whereby psychological exhaustion of the more vunlerable plays an active role in keeping us in place.
From another angle: simply put, fascist AI and all its symptoms force some of us academics to confront our complicity, our intertwinededness, and the moral imperative to take a stand. I will not be silently complicit in extracting from mentees and students, whether its their data, their emotional and cognitive labour, or anything else. I will not stand by and allow the university to be hollowed out and destroyed. An imperfect institution needs to be improved, not sold to the lowest bidder — or sadly and more accurately, should not pay a subscription to the evillest corporation.
Abdaljawad Omar outlines Western academia and society in general as
"a listening subject already fortified against the implications of what it hears, a political discourse that turns truth into noise, that converts even the most exhaustive documentation into the occasion for another round of managed uncertainty, and that has learned to wear the grammar of intelligence as its instrument of foreclosure. [...] The Western intellectual's cowardice is real: the fork in the road existed, the choice was made, the responsibility is not dissolved by calling it structural."
In the time of AI enabled genocide in Palestine, where we watch AI companies clamour to facilitate the USA's attack on Iran, as well as openly flaunting their contributions to planetary destruction, we are also witnessing the loss of the university. We sell out to companies so much, it's not even on all people's radars as a conflict of interest. We had one job. Our role as academics is to protect this one institution. This is why we receive tax money; why we're basically civil servants. The role of the university is even lost on many, so bears repeating: produce knowledge and educate at the highest level. AI destroys both at their core. It exposes some of us as confused, some of us as opportunistic, and both groups as cowards who would rather extract than reflect, would rather move fast and break things than learn to follow the slow and methodical praxis of scholarly work.
This emotional extraction and turmoil is also very personal. Who as an academic in their right mind would not feel betrayed, angry, unhinged — a shattering of our worldview — at the discovery that our colleagues, our superiors, those who manage the university at every level are fine with all this? They are fine with complicity in genocide, in scholasticide at home as well as abroad, in the destruction of their own university itself.
I have cried and lost sleep countless times... a new day a new chance for a loss of faith, for new levels of anything from anxiety to fear to depression to a braid of all the above. Why do so many of my colleagues, especially those with power to act, not see it? Why do they not care? We all who ask, in pain not in true questioning, know why. AI is a fascist project that enables and is enabled by all these interlocking events. And we've even been here before.
This emotional extraction and turmoil also extends to everything. The realisation the students are being pushed into this morass too: Can I trust my own mentees? I have caught myself thinking that a student's work is AI-generated when I had no good reason to. Just because the work was exceptionally good, something we had worked on together over months, I, anxiety-ridden and my trust in everybody fragile, reasoned it could be infected by AI. I went into the files and I looked at the historical edits. There was no evidence of AI, but just the dawning realisation that I and others like me could lose our grip, have lost our grip, on what trusting a colleague or a mentee means. I should have had the confidence to trust my junior collaborator without looking at the edit history.
I hated myself deeply in that moment. I remember crying so much. I also had flashbacks to many other unpleasant feelings of rejection from colleagues over my principles, over research areas, over the mere idea that certain people actually do deserve their voices heard, finally. It all mixes together in such moments. I really let it all get to me.
The second time these thoughts came over me, familiar but the memory did not help stop the anxiety from regrowing, festering. I felt so unwell and hated myself so much for thinking these thoughts, for accusing somebody even if just in my mind. I went to bed for about two days. Why should I be perpendicular to the world when I want it to go away?
As academics, we keep asking our employer to listen to us, to understand that our demands are about the future of the university as an institution, about the toppling of expertise and skill-learning as we know it. We don't want Microsoft's nonsense products. But we also do not want the frames and rhetoric from industry; we refuse the maliciously designed concepts, the pathetically framed sales pitches, the arguments from ignorance. No, if AI is a vague term, one cannot conclude some AI may be useful. No, Google's Alphafold is not scientific and not a different kind of technology. It's built on very similar formalisms — and perhaps even more importantly, constitutes the corporate capture of biology. Yes, such models are barely scientific. Thank goodness Google has killed it both as a product and as an excuse for these kinds of anti-scientific claims.
AI's way of thinking is not just anti-science, but spills into pseudoscience and other forms of complete detachment from reality. Core to the anxiety I am experiencing is that I feel so many around me have become unmoored from ethical and practical concerns, like keeping universities going, and attached instead to nonsense, to put it mildly. Nikhil Suresh explains this:
"Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or 'randomly' selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space — boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants — to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory."
Universities have done this too. And we best listen to those who blow these whistles before it's too late.
OK, so I had a few panic attacks because I realised the fabric of trust between me and my students, especially my closer mentees, was pretty thin. And also damaged is the belief that my colleagues, and even the university in general, have similar goals, like a love of learning and of teaching, a respect and appreciation for our jobs, a deep care for the psychological landscapes we all inhabit, and a need to cultivate our social relationships . Recall how like AI extracts labour, I witness senior colleagues extract from juniors their mental, and especially emotional, labour, offloading stress and cognitive processing onto others. And most disturbingly, pushing onto them this labour in their time of need. AI's logics do this to us too. Attacking educators and researchers is not a coincidence, but a group of people vulnerable after many rounds of funding cuts and anti-scientific and anti-humanistic thinking.
So what can we learn from this? Well, firstly, the obvious: be kind to ourselves if we feel the walls closing in because... well, yes, they are, so we need all the mental and physical fortitude we can muster. But, and perhaps more importantly than the well-known "take care of ourselves and others", we must keep at the forefront: this is what AI companies want. They want us to falter and get sick. They want us to have panic attacks, which sure, we will have, but — and this is the really vital bit — we will strive not to resolve the panic by allowing AI logics in.
Argument from ignorance, which a panic attack might trigger, is not valid: there is no good AI, just because it's a confusing terminological mess. The same goes for descent into using AI-detection tools. Just because some prose may look like it's written using an AI tool, in fact there is no such thing as automated plagiarism detection software. They are a scam sold by the very same companies that create the AI systems used for plagiarism in the first place. And companies through such so-called tools want to further erode our trust in each other.
Nor is it OK to allow AI to rule us by guiding our teaching — in fact I and my coauthors implore us not to
"allow AI, neither as bully nor so-called tool, to redefine our roles as educators or researchers. It is not our job to chase hype. What this means is by all means educators should feel empowered and inspired by the urgency to uplift students, but not to use AI to do so."
We also do not need to obey in advance as some love to do under increasing fascism. As Timothy Snyder explains:
"Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and thfen offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
In our capacity as academics, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is our job itself. How can anybody in their right mind notice the growing damage to universities and instead of stand against this, facilitate the destruction of expertise, of learning skills, and of academic integrity? And the simplest stand is to refuse all the frames that want us scared and distrustful and instead embrace just doing our jobs and supporting each other.
Credit for the pixel art goes to Magnific. The roses are a wallpaper from the Smithsonian.