About 20 students gathered in the Main Quad at Cal State Monterey Bay on Monday, kicking off a week of activism across the CSU system in protest of the school’s multimillion-dollar contract with OpenAI.
The protest was organized by Sunrise Monterey Bay, a leading organization of student activism at CSUMB. The group also organized last semester’s “ICE Out!” protest, and has participated in previous anti-AI action – including last month’s successful push to remove Flock cameras from Monterey County.
This time, their fight is against CSU’s controversial contract with OpenAI, which was renewed in May for a three-year period. The new contract will see CSU paying $13 million a year to the tech giant in exchange for student and faculty access to ChatGPT Edu, effectively a copy of the free product with additional privacy protections in place.
“My friends have assignments where they have to use AI, and their assignments are, like, have a conversation with ChatGPT,” said Maya James, a third-year biology major who attended Monday’s protest. “They’re putting money toward that rather than toward faculty, students, housing, literally anything else…they just chose that without consulting students where there could be money that could be used in a lot of other places.”
CSU isn’t the only school scrambling to embrace the technology, which is rapidly evolving and not fully understood, even by its own creators. Yet the students pushing back argue that in their enthusiasm, university leaders are failing to protect them from inherent risks ranging from dangerous chatbot conversations about mental health to wide-scale “cognitive surrender” from those using it to breeze through homework assignments.
CSU’s policies around AI use in the classroom require students to disclose when and where the technology is used. However, as demonstrated by the Lutrinae’s investigation into former CSUMB president Vanya Quiñones’s emails last semester, so-called AI checkers are highly unreliable, and have famously pinged documents like the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
“Something that I think is dangerous about it is the fact that it’s actively being pushed into places of education, such as the CSUs,” said Danial Siddiq, a first-year undeclared student at CSUMB. “I think out of my classes, two of my professors have had assignments where we have to use AI, which is pretty gross when you think about the context of it…It’s frequently incorrect. It has biases. It’s just not a trustworthy source for education.”
According to Cori Lopez, fourth-year environmental science major and hub coordinator for Sunrise Monterey Bay, the group – originally founded to fight climate change – was motivated to lead the charge against AI not only by its academic implications, but by environmental ones.
Those concerns, like the technology itself, are complex and not yet fully understood, but include enormous energy and water consumption along with carbon emissions.
“We recognize that artificial intelligence is a topic that has sparked important debate and a wide range of perspectives,” a CSU spokesperson said in a statement after the contract renewal was announced. “We take seriously the concerns expressed about the ethical and responsible use of AI. At the same time, the CSU has made significant progress expanding access to AI tools and training for nearly half a million students and more than 63,000 faculty and staff. We believe continuing that work is essential to preparing our students, faculty, and staff for the future.”
Many students and community members seem to disagree. A faculty-founded petition urging Chancellor Mildred García to cancel the costly contract has gained over 4,000 signatures, with its goal currently set for 6,400 total.
Representatives of Sunrise and other activist groups have urged sympathetic students to sign the petition in hopes of swaying the school from its current path.