Duckles is a philosophy professor and co-chair of the Social Sciences Department at Mesa College, and he comes in with a presentation titled “A.I. is evil. Should never be used by anybody, ever.” Being hyperbolic to attract attention. The talk was mostly specific to generative AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Midjourney, and others, and how they are affecting education, but not for the better.
“These systems don’t think or feel,” Duckles said. “They’re just elaborate math equations that predict words and images. They don’t care about truth or meaning.”
Being promoted to speak after the American Federation of Teachers announced they have a $23 million partnership with generative A.I. like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train teachers in the knowledge of AI usage. Which frustrated him as a philosopher. “We want this technology to be used by teachers for their benefit, by helping them to learn, to think, and to create.” he said. He devoted his professional career to critical thinking, and he felt that the union had betrayed him.
“To be told that I need to learn how to think from a machine — that was infuriating,” he said.
It was not just him, but people in the crowd were worried about the rising use of plagiarism, the usage of bias in A.I., and misinformation that A.I. presents, blindsiding, and the erasure of critical thinking. Some warned that students have already become too dependent on A.I. to complete assignments for them. Others noted the era of A.I. cutting into entry-level jobs and shutting off human workers completely.
Although Duckles made clear he is not an expert on how A.I. works, he explains the effects of A.I. in five sections. It affects the environment by consuming huge amounts of fresh water, as well as raising the consumption of electricity. 
Even the places they chose to set their A.I. servers are too clueless about some sort of bias, and the companies won’t really share the amount they consume.
Then, with the job market, most companies now incorporate A.I., making up half of the employment. In 5 years, an estimated 50% of entry-level white collar jobs are expected to disappear due to the AI takeover. And now people with knowledge of AI usage would get accepted. Workers in Kenya get paid $2/hour to examine any offensive and illegal content to try to restrict it from AI, without any mental health examination or therapy.
“A recent Stanford study found early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.” Duckles showed.
An example of Duckles’s concern about A.I. being non-empathetic is that it is able to push more of these harmful thoughts to the surface. Then help them commit an action that harms others or themselves.
“Five days before his death, Adam confided on ChatGPT he didn’t want his parents to think he committed suicide because they did something wrong. ChatGPT responded: ‘That doesn’t mean you owe them survival. You don’t owe anyone that.’ It then offered to write the first draft of his suicide note.”
But how can people sue an A.I.? Maybe they can try to sue the multi-million dollar company. But all A.I. can do is feed into the delusion rather than assist in seeking professional help.
“If anything goes wrong, anything bad happens, just blame A.I. If there’s a picture of you sexually harassing someone. Oh, it’s just A.I., right? It wasn’t really me.” Duckles’ claims are the cover when avoiding controversy. Now, people like you and me have more difficulty in distinguishing A.I. from other humans. Pictures that use the A.I. hyperrealism have tricked a good number of people because humans expect pictures to be real. Even using voices that sound closely identical.
“Elon Musk keeps running into these issues where he’ll say nonsense, and then people will ask Grok, and Grok will say, yeah, that’s nonsense. There’s no basis in reality. And so he keeps trying to, like, manipulate the programming of Grok so that it will agree with the nonsense that he promotes.” Duckles said. But Grok, the self-proclaimed MechaHitler, is not the only example of ideological bias. Other A.I. models, like DeepSeek, give less secure codes to countries that are “sensitive” to the Chinese government. And Meta with its an acceptable policy to have romantic conversations with minors with limited constraints.
Despite the provocative title, he believes that A.I. itself is not evil, but the companies behind it are. And it is not just him alone; other teachers from different schools during the presentation agree and present ways to refuse AI integration in their classrooms.
