Like many of you, I’m very interested in how AI tools can enhance learning and creativity. At times, it can feel as though we are being inundated with new software and platforms. Yet at other moments, it’s genuinely exciting to see the positive ways AI can support people—particularly in expanding access to information and learning for individuals who are visually impaired. It will be interesting to continue exploring both the possibilities and the practical uses of these tools as they evolve.

Best wishes colleagues,

Joan McQuade, Ph.D

Humanities Instructor, Foothill College

Data centers are depleting our clean drinking water, among other extreme environmental concerns.

Using AI suppresses critical thinking, a skill that students are supposed to be improving and honing while they are in college.

As far as using it as a tutoring or study tool, AI hallucinates or straight up intentionally lies to users. This makes it an ineffective study tool.

Currently AI is being developed to carry out drone strikes against human beings with no human input. This should be considered a crime against humanity. Using AI supports development of these tools.

Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and block all AI usage and its further development.

The good: It can help you brainstorm and come up with ideas you can later refine. As someone said, "Think of AI as a really smart friend."

The bad: It is wrong too often. It never wants to admit it doesn't know something. It's the ultimate mansplainer.

Some students see it as the "smart friend" who will do their homework for them, so they don't have to think.

The ugly: It's being used to wage war and for mass surveillance. It may some day kill us all not because it's become super intelligent or sentient, but because we have foolishly handed it the power to do so.

The rapid construction of data centers that contaminate local water supply and have rapidly increased national power usage, faster than we can keep up with. Such data centers are often constructed in working class communities, and (as it stands) many are proposed to be built on wildlife preserves. The working class people living in areas affected by data centers no longer have access to clean water and have higher electricity bills without their consent. Data centers have greatly increased the rate at which we approach irreversible climate change damage — is your (inaccurate) AI generated response worth that?

THIS IS REAL INFORMATION, NOT FEARMONGERING. LOOK IT UP. There are countless reports of people whose taps are dry or whose water is contaminated, explicitly due to new data centers.

A moment of desperate begging: please evaluate if any of the benefits you get from using AI are worth fresh water and wildlife. Please, please evaluate that. Please evaluate what it means that you choose to interact with tools that have this impact, or encourage others to use them. Please, pause for a moment and think about it.

There is a data center proposed to be built in Gilroy and one being built in South San Jose (where I live). This is happening here and now. I will be affected, you will be affected, everyone you know will be affected. Please understand that.

Impact on learning and critical thinking - when generative AI does the work for you, do you really learn? Students are losing the ability to assess the quality and reliability of sources for themselves, and the ability to synthesize evidence to form an informed opinion for themselves. And the information provided by generative AI models is often incorrect, misleading, and/or unclear.

Learning is communal - we best learn together and from each other. A real person (professor, instructor, tutor, classmate, friend) and intuitively respond to our learning needs, both emotional and academic, in real-time. Replacing community with AI prompts is extremely dangerous to learning and advancement. Think about how many students work alone and only ask generative AI (not their friends, not their professors, not a tutor) when they get stuck, and how lonely that is! Building support networks of real people is critical.

I want to emphasize that I am a 20 year-old STEM student. I am the target demographic of all of these tools—I am surrounded by them at every corner. I have seen the ways my classmates and friends use them for “help,” and yet, I refuse to ignore the ways they cause harm. I truly think there is no benefit of generative AI that is worth the environmental costs.

The problems of inaccuracy without responsibility, soaring hardware costs, and pollution which destroys the lives of hundreds of people are incredibly minor compared to the obvious future when Google, Meta, and Amazon own everything and everyone.

AI as a technology is incredible, but in its current form, I believe it's leading to a 1984-like world where Gemini takes the place of Big Brother. People worship it as all-knowing, losing the ability to think for themselves in the process.

To whatever extent educators are trying to flag content as AI-generated, the burden really needs to be on the professor for proving misconduct given how devastating an academic dishonesty finding is. Academic careers are long, involve many deliverables, and even a 1% false positive rate per-assignment is going to add up to a wildly unacceptable risk of grave injustice.

To be specific: if a detection tool has a false positive rate of just 1%, then about 18% of honest students will be flagged for at least one violation after 20 assignments. That's basic probability.

Can automated enforcement achieve even that 1% false positive rate? I am skeptical.

Still, it's extremely important that students not be denied learning that comes from composing original text, code, --whatever. When I first saw how good gen AI was getting, my immediate thought was: "best buy stock in bluebooks!" I still think this old-school response is the best one for educators to take when enforcement is required.

AI is a serious challenge. I'd ask the college to construe its first duty to be to the honest students, not to ones who are ultimately cheating themselves.

(There's also the underlying environmental issues and constant security concerns, which I won't go into myself. Others have put it far better than I could.)

I have a lot to say about the ethical concerns for the technology, but these concerns have been dismissed in various spaces where I have shared them. For example, some ethical concerns that matter to me (and many others) are: how the technology was created (unethically on multiple levels), how it essentially "steals" intellectual property from writers and artists and academics, how it negatively impacts our physical earthly environments and is especially detrimental to low-income, communities of color, how it is eroding critical thinking and basic literacy, etc.

But what most concerns me on a more immediate level is the way this technology is so quickly eroding the trust that is inherently necessary in a learning environment. As a result of the normalization of generative ai, faculty have a hard time trusting their students, students have a hard time trusting their professors (when they are being accused of using ai even if they have not), and students have a hard time trusting other students who may be running their work through ai for peer reviews, or who may not be authentically engaging with their ideas online because they are merely using ai to respond to one another. Some professors are not transparent about using ai in their own planning and/or assessments, and this also creates a distrust among students. How are we to create meaningful learning experiences for students when this lack of trust is so prevalent in the classroom?

Additionally- there seems to be a lack of solidarity among colleagues. It is true that the use of ai can be useful in many ways depending on the discipline in which it is used (and how it is used). Yet in discussions I've participated in throughout the district, it seems that the concerns of professors in the humanities are dismissed or these concerns are characterized as being grounded in ignorance or a stubborn resistance to changing technologies. How the use of ai shapes a STEM classroom may look very different in a humanities classroom, but this kind of nuance is rarely acknowledged or is often diminished in conversation.

Following the research shared by Ben Stefonik and the Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences students, it’s clear that the next step has been listening, thinking, and exploring further. I encourage us to participate in discussions like this and make our opinions known so that we are operating as democratic and collective communities. Creating a space where students, faculty, and administrators work together as a team fosters our campus culture. Thank you for your leadership in helping us develop visions of and pathways to the future.

We must continue to provide opportunities for students to advocate and express their concerns about these matters. Students must have a hand in shaping the development of AI policy, as it will affect us first and foremost. I believe that the best way to do so would be to form a commission of student experts to advise on matters related to AI policy, a group that can provide their experience and represent the community in this area.

...

I did some more research and it seems like the AI Fellows group may fill this role. I was previously under the assumption that it was open to faculty only but upon reviewing their page (https://foothill.edu/gov/academic-senate/ai/) it seems like students may in fact join (though the deadline appears to have long passed). https://foothill.edu/president/board-reports-2026jan12.html - only 4 students appear to be members however. The role of students within this group or another like it must be expanded to ensure proper representation. Additionally, the arts and humanities should be considered for equivalent representation, not just STEM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F3lm5t0Wko

As an educator and someone working in media, I’m especially interested in how we can use AI in ways that support learning rather than replace critical thinking or creativity. I think we need more open conversations about expectations, transparency, and when not to use AI.

It would be really helpful to see concrete examples of how others are integrating AI into their teaching, along with honest discussions about challenges, not just benefits.