Academic Integrity, Generative Software, and Catholic, Jesuit Higher Education in the Context of Neoliberal Global Society

This is a reflection on different aspects of higher education and generative software (so-called 'ai') in light of Ignatian discernment, especially the key consideration of "context." Drawing on administrative and classroom work at a Jesuit university in the United States, Catholic Social Teaching principles, papal teaching on social justice and technology, and an honest consideration of generative software's social, corporate, and ecological contexts, this reflection soberly assesses the fraught nature of complicity with such neoliberal, exploitative, and extractive contexts for Jesuit institutions of higher education. While it is easier to go along with mainstream economic and cultural assumptions, I claim here that the problems with generative software systems and the practices of the companies that make them available are so antithetical to the stated aims of Jesuit education and Catholic Social Teaching that debates about the functionality of generative software in educational spaces are posterior to the debates that matter most.