The intellectual bankruptcy of anti-AI academic alarmism: a rebuttal

This article presents a concise rebuttal to the anti-AI academic alarmism advanced by Flenady and Sparrow, whose arguments – though influential in the humanities – misapply philosophical categories, romanticize higher education’s past, and disregard economic realities shaping contemporary universities. Their invocation of Frankfurt’s ‘bullshit’ conflates human intent with the statistical, accuracy-driven nature of generative AI. Through a framing of ‘moral agency’ as a prerequisite for knowledge transmission and restricting terms like ‘collaborator’ or ‘tutor’ to humans, they ignore centuries of learning mediated by non-agential tools and the dynamic evolution of educational language. Their idealized vision of authentic teacher-student relationships fails to account for the massified, impersonal structures that define real-world universities. Finally, their framing of student responsibility as a ‘perverse’ burden undermines agency and critical thinking, while their call for exclusively human instruction disregards the necessity of scalable, equitable models in an era of soaring demand and resource constraints.