Big tech continues its ensnaring of a desperate education industry.
Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic — three leading AI chatbot makers — have poured $23 million into the second largest teachers’ union in the US, the New York Times reports.
The union, the American Federation of Teachers, revealed its tech patrons on Tuesday, when it announced that it was using the funding to launch an AI training center for educators, which is being called the National Academy for AI Instruction.
Randi Wengarten, president of the AFT, which represents some 1.8 million members, told the NYT that the New York City-based center will be an “innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how AI works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically.”
“It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other,” she added.
Per the NYT, Microsoft is providing the lion’s share with $12.5 million for the center over the next two years. OpenAI is close behind with $10 million in funding and technical resources, and Anthropic is chipping in $500,000 for the first year.
The funding comes at a time when educators are strapped for cash. The Trump administration moved to cut off nearly $7 billion in funding for public schools last week, which included money that would go directly towards teacher training programs and afterschool activities. Trump has also made no secret of his intent to completely dismantle the Department of Education, which doles out funds to K-12 schools and provides financial aid to students.
Money, however, isn’t a problem for the AI-enamored tech industry, and it’s wasted absolutely no time to suck learning institutions into its orbit. Some of the most notable examples come from higher education. Duke University recently partnered with OpenAI to offer unlimited ChatGPT access to students, along with unveiling its own “DukeGPT” tool. And last month, Ohio State University announced that it would make all of its students take mandatory “AI fluency” courses starting next fall.
Needless to say, it’s an uneasy marriage. Many educators are frustrated with the explosive rise of the tools, which has led to a distressing number of their students turning in entire essays and other assignments that were AI-generated with almost zero effort.
AI models are also notorious for hallucinating, or fabricating factual claims, along with frequently defying their own safety guardrails. But most alarmingly, a burgeoning but compelling body of scientific research has linked excessive use of AI chatbots with plummeting grades and memory loss in students, and a sharp decline in critical thinking skills — a phenomenon that’s being called cognitive offloading, a study led by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found.
“I do think that there is a risk,” Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, told the NYT, stressing the need for more research into the cognitive effects of generative AI usage. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”
The funding of an AI training center may not be as blatant an intrusion into education as OpenAI shoving ChatGPT down colleges’ throats, but in the end it serves the purpose of making AI in education feel like a foregone conclusion. Never mind that the tech hasn’t proven it can reliably get facts straight, or that we’re still grappling with its long-term effects on the brain — because, kids, your teachers are already accepting that it’s here to stay. They’re being put through big-tech funded courses to learn about it, all under the guise of ensuring everyone can use AI “safely and ethically.”
“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a president of union representing the institution’s librarians and lectures, told the NYT.
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