Gen AI Killjoy sticker designed by Hiba Abdallah, 2025

The onslaught of generative AI has been devastating to faculty and students who are dedicated to critical and creative thinking, making and doing. It is especially cruel for faculty who have spent their careers studying the genocidal, settler colonial, racial, sexual, gender, economic and ableist violences of Predatory Data (Anita Say Chan, 2025), and working to create non-rapacious anti-violent technological futures. In the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, students and faculty have been working together to give language to the cruel losses that we’ve been experiencing – the loss of student engagement, discussion and even eye-contact in the classroom, replaced by students reading vacuous ChatGPT statements directly from their phones/computers; the loss of student excitement around their own risky and difficult new ideas, replaced by badly plagiarized and truly boring AI platitudes; the loss of our fantasy that universities could be institutions that defend and support critical and creative work, replaced by university administrative leadership obeying in advance to the autocratic tech oligarch salespitch (that genAI is inevitable and good). In the meantime, we’ve also been building new (and returning to very old) strategies to remind students that GenAI will neither think nor learn for them, and that their own brains will always generate work that is more complex, nuanced, and simply better than anything these “bullshit machines” (ChatGPT and any other LLM app) spits out.¹

For faculty members who believe in the transformational power of learning, this has been a heartbreaking development that leads to more and faster burnout, malaise, depression, and anxiety for faculty of all ranks, but especially faculty in precarious positions who feel that by exerting regulatory efforts on student GenAI use, they compromise their chances of being rehired due to high failure rate in their classes and the fear/threat of negative student evaluations. This heartbreak has us cohering around Sara Ahmed’s anti-racist and queer feminist killjoy: those who “disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places.”⁵

We join scholars like Maggie Fernandes, who writes that “Killjoy energy is so stark in the GenAI context because the marketing surrounding GenAI is so optimistic, so cheery” (see Fernandes 2025, “On Being a GenAI Killjoy”). As Martha Kenney and Martha Lincoln show, while the oligopoly of big coercive tech has promised that AI brings endless happiness – “an ‘everything machine’ (Bender and Hanna, 2025, p. 147) that will ‘accelerate research, personalise learning and drive productivity’ (London Business School)” – there is no scholarly or scientific research to support this cheery optimism. In the face of costly university investments in GenAI, or tacit acceptance of its inevitability, faculty and students are effectively working as unpaid researchers for these large companies, charged with finding reasons to use these tools. As Kenney and Lincoln put it, “the best strategy to resist the enshittification of higher education by the tech oligarchy is refusal. Refuse to use AI chatbots; refuse to accept the AI contracts the administration makes on our behalf; refuse to do the dirty work of AI firms by finding use cases for AI in our classrooms” (Kenney & Lincoln 2025, np). Given our experience, and the experience of every faculty member who has ever published on or talked about the topic, the only happiness that GenAI secures is for tech oligarchs delighting in the deregulated market of data and profit hoarding, and university administrators enjoying the opportunity to fire faculty and eliminate programs. Faculty who have built their research and pedagogy expertise in fields shaped by and for social justice refuse to pretend we are happy with “ced[ing] the future of education to the interests of Big Tech, no matter how convincing their sales pitch” (Kenney & Lincoln 2025, np).

We want to ensure that faculty who remain committed to holding students accountable for their own learning and who put in the work of making their classrooms sites for genuine learning and critical engagement with or of new technologies like GenAI, are valued for their expertise and efforts. And we want to give students the opportunity and tools to learn for themselves, to experience the satisfaction and confidence that comes with doing the hard work of building their own intellectual-creative practices through effort, error, and enthusiasm.

In the following pages, we are compiling resources for faculty and students who refuse anticipatory obeyance. We will be adding to these pages as the experiments in refusal continue. And we would love to hear from you if you want to join our working group (we meet about once a month), or share any of the pedagogical and research materials that you’ve been creating.

For more, see “GenAI and Classroom Dynamics: Part I”

“GenAI and Classroom Dynamics: Part II” which looks at pedagogical experiments we’ve been running

“GenAI and Classroom Dynamics: Mythbusters” which addresses some of the myths our students are navigating

(Coming soon: assignments, reading suggestions, and full syllabi)