In summer 2024 Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, announced the launch of Eureka Labs, an educational tech company that designs AI teaching assistants that use course materials provided by teachers to guide students. Using a single platform, Karpathy hopes to make education available to all 8 billion people on Earth (assuming they have reliable Internet and working computing devices). This is an example of how AI literacy discourse often espouses a utilitarian, technosolutionist approach to teaching, ignoring critiques of how these tools impact teachers and students.
This webinar will interrogate how a utilitarian, technosolutionist approach to teaching with generative AI empowers AI companies and reinforces current labor and social structures. Instructors will be invited to design teaching strategies using critical digital pedagogy concepts that help students critique the hype surrounding generative AI’s capabilities. By the end of the webinar, educators will have powerful tools for collaborating with students on how best to use generative AI in their classrooms, or not at all.