Recl[AI]m Futures AI Manifestation and Syllabus Statement

With the use of AI encouraged in many spaces today, we offer a manifestation and syllabus statement of our perspective

The Manifestation

We, The Digital Apothecary Lab, as a collective of educators and alchemists reject AI as presented to us.

  • We challenge the notion that what AI promises is inherently helpful.

  • We denounce the White supremacist logics of urgency and ableism that underpin the inevitability of AI.

  • We do not valorize a digital future nor romanticize an analog past but remain steadfast for the possibility to create a world that holds both together.

  • We recognize the ways the development and use of these technologies harm lands, waters, and peoples, and we contend that any theoretical benefit or utility of these technologies does not justify these harms.

  • We condemn the unequal power relations that reward AI corporations for the theft of original ideas while using these very systems to reinvest in surveillance and punishment of the most marginalized end users.

  • We take steps towards a future that does not rely on these technologies in coercive ways.

  • We insist that pushing for productivity is not a real solution to societal problems within a capitalist system.

  • We call forth a new relation with the digital through the integration of technologies derived before its birth and those we have yet to imagine.

  • We collaborate with our communities to ensure that alternative tools, knowledges, and engagements are centered.

Through imagining more just worlds with our communities, we recl[AI]m the possibilities of ethical digital futures by championing slow work where we value process over product.

We will attempt to tread a little lighter on the planet, at least in the context of this classroom. Assignments and grades will be submitted both by hand and electronically depending on the requirements. Students are encouraged to use the same notebook and journal for in class assignments. I take seriously the hidden environmental and human costs of AI so we will continue to minimize its use in this class and the resulting harm it causes. My lab, the Digital Apothecary, has written a statement about AI in which we question its growing role in our world. There is no question that in this class, AI should not be used for course work as we are embarking on the very human process of creating our own stories. “Any use of content generated by artificial intelligence, constitutes a violation of Northwestern’s academic integrity policy.”

— Syllabus Statement