The fight against AI at Winnipeg’s Red River College

Students and faculty at Red River College are sounding the alarm about the school’s integration of AI. They say the move reveals a growing conflict between the interests of students and faculty in quality education on one side, and the interests of the administration in turning a profit on the other.

The North Star spoke with William*, Eric*, and Shirley*, three design students. They say the climate at the school is becoming hostile as the faculty attempts to clamp down on the growing unrest from departments under threat by the technology. They also say immediately endangered fields like design are only canaries in the coalmine. In their view, the unregulated spread of AI will create problems for our whole society.

“We started getting prompts last year to start using AI in our work. It was my first realization that the administration wants AI to be around,” says William. “It just grew and grew until this year, it is everywhere now.” 

Students are concerned that by encouraging the use of AI for research and coursework, the administration is cheapening the professional training students pay tuition to receive.

However, they also say the school lacks basic democratic structures to raise these concerns beyond the departmental level, describing the administration itself like “masked men behind doors.” 

“We aren’t supposed to know about them, or email them, or discuss things with them,” says Shirley. “There aren’t any answers of how you would even get there. [When we raise issues] we might get told ‘go to these people,’ but then those people don’t actually have any power.” 

Shirley cites the school’s poster boards as an example. “You have to apply. It takes months to get anything up, and anything questioning the college is immediately taken down. Trust me, we’ve tried.”

She explains the rapid rollout of AI is making this lack of accountability even clearer. “The administration is obviously intent to move in this direction [because] it is cheaper. It means less administrative staff they have to hire, and less contact they have to have with the student body.”

“This will only grow that power dynamic where seven people control the entire college and then there is the rest of the student body who have absolutely no connection.” 

This is why many at the school were excited when news came that the administration planned to hold a “fireside chat” on the subject of AI in education. It is also why, upon arriving at the event on January 29, their excitement quickly turned into anger.

“It was pitched as a chat. It was not that. A chat means there will be two sides of a conversation,” says Shirley. Instead, the audience was given a QR code which they could use to ask their questions to a chatbot. 

Those interested in speaking to a real person would have to wait for the Q&A, which was scheduled to begin after classes had resumed, effectively barring students and faculty from participating.

Students describe how, after sitting through about 40 minutes of the event, people began to stand up and demand the Q&A begin early, turning it into the first opportunity students and faculty had ever had to air their grievances.

Now, the administration is accusing teachers of fomenting the student unrest. “There’s been investigations opened up of the instructors who spoke up. They are now facing possible repercussions based on student actions,” says Shirley. “Our instructors’ livelihoods and our education are under threat. It’s hard.”

Eric says this pushback indicates the administration is afraid of collaboration between students and faculty, and argues students should take this to heart. “The more that students and teachers can be on the same page, the more power we have to make choices that benefit everybody and lead to a more dynamic learning environment.”

Deeper problems

William says the heart of the problem is AI’s relationship with labour. “AI removes the idea of a lot of entry-level positions. It gets to the point where 15 years later, there is nobody in the industry at all, because nobody was hiring entry-level positions.”

While job loss is a commonly talked about consequence of AI, what is less talked about are the effects its unplanned penetration into every sector of the economy may have on our society’s ability to reproduce itself.

Shirley points out that students can already see the beginnings of destabilization occurring at RRC. “Even in the short period of time I have been here, people refer way less to instructors, there is less work between departments, and students interact less with each other, because they rely more on AI.”

“It gets to the point of questioning why even have students and instructors if both can be replaced by chatbots.” 

Eric says this reveals the need to get beyond purely moral arguments against AI. “The larger issue is the role it plays in the development of critical thinking skills. In an academic setting, making sure that everything being written is registered and documented properly teaches people how to build on previous research, and how to recognize and read real information.” 

“AI destroys this ability to question what you are learning, because it presents totally skewed information as reasoned, which makes it harder to do the work needed to ask, ‘in what ways?’ and ‘to what degree?’” Eric points out that, in encouraging students to use AI, schools are actively undermining their own research standards.

“It’s critical that we as a student body maintain a unified front and a unified voice in our rejection of this technology,” he says. “Everybody is going to be affected by AI. We can’t ignore it, we need to stand up together for our rights as students to have an education based on best practices.”

William says now is the time for students to act. “We’re at the ground level right now because there are no regulations on this technology. Especially as the administration is trying to widen this gap between them and the students, it is up to us to find ways of getting our voices out, like we did at the fireside chat.” 

For Eric, the struggle against AI in education is an important part of the broader struggle to build a Canada which works for ordinary people.

“We are in a time of the ultra-wealthy and of a decline towards fascism. Critical thinking is necessary to push back. The more we lose our critical thinking skills and our ability to question what people in power tell us, the more they are able to accomplish to the detriment of general society, in terms of environmental, political, and cultural issues.” 

“There’s power in numbers. There’s power in being loud. There’s power in standing firm on principles and not accepting when people with authority tell us that ‘this is just the way it is.’ We can’t just accept and hope for the best. We need to be at the table, and we need to insist on the institutions we have paid to be a part of that our education is consistent with our values as human beings,” he says.

*Pseudonyms have been used at the request of interviewees.