Insidious chatter versus critical thinking: Resisting the Eurocentric siren song of AI in the classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to the ongoing discussion about the impacts of utilizing emerging technologies – especially AI learning – in higher education. After reviewing the pros and cons of using ChatGPT in the classroom as they are typically considered, I raise a deeper, less frequently addressed concern: the pervasive persistence of Eurocentric biases in the academy and the danger that AI-empowered software will reinforce them further. To this end, I present the findings of a simple experiment I conducted, directing ChatGPT to produce and refine a syllabus for an undergraduate course on modern political philosophy, together with an essay responding to one of the questions set in the syllabus. The results clearly demonstrate the grave potential for such supposedly ‘time-saving’ technological shortcuts to re-inscribe Eurocentric thinking and unconscious biases, thus seriously complicating the vital, already challenging task of decolonizing the academy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".