Making The Hard Sell: Teaching Against The Inevitability Narrative of Ai

The tsunami of AI hype has been unavoidable. Look carefully at the language and tactics of AI boosters and doomers alike and it’s easy to miss what’s just outside of their framing: the assumption that AI’s dominance - everywhere and in every which way - is a given. But how can that be if we, as those who assist and collaborate with, and ARE researchers have not first gone through the steps of fully evaluating this technology and its implications? Throughout the Fall 2025 semester, I’ve been teaching an AI Essentials workshop open to faculty, students, and staff. Attendees of this workshop were whisked through a 60-minute presentation that reviews the building blocks of artificial intelligence (AI), briefly touching on: the history of AI, how these systems affect our physical, social, political, legal, economic, and information landscape, how these technologies work, and what this means in the context of conducting academic research. The goal of the session is to help participants recognize their agency and responsibilities as researchers, and to connect their technology to the larger, complex systems to which their use is fundamentally tied. Rooted in a deeply humanist approach, the sessions do not start or end with the technology. Instead, I situate AI Literacy as necessarily about the intersection of environmental, geopolitical, sociological, economic, and legal issues. AI is not a tool or a platform; it comprises complex systems with varying degrees of visibility to users. Materializing these technologies and grounding an understanding of these systems with a combination of real world examples and theoretical frameworks empowers audiences to think critically about their relationship to and engagement with AI.