{"id":35632,"date":"2025-10-18T09:31:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T09:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-real-danger-of-ai-in-education-isnt-cheating-its-dependency-on-big-tech-algorithms-a-business-professor-warns\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T09:31:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T09:31:28","slug":"the-real-danger-of-ai-in-education-isnt-cheating-its-dependency-on-big-tech-algorithms-a-business-professor-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-real-danger-of-ai-in-education-isnt-cheating-its-dependency-on-big-tech-algorithms-a-business-professor-warns\/","title":{"rendered":"The real danger of AI in education isn&#8217;t cheating &mdash; it&#8217;s dependency on Big Tech algorithms, a business professor warns"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68e5220b1c1f80efbec510f8?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Kimberley Hardcastle\"\/><figcaption>Kimberley Hardcastle said generative AI is quietly shifting knowledge and critical thinking from humans to Big Tech&#039;s algorithms.<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Kimberley Hardcastle<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>A professor warned that AI is making students dependent on Big Tech&#039;s algorithms for knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>Anthropic data shows students already use AI to write, edit, and even solve assignments directly.<\/li>\n<li>Kimberley Hardcastle of Northumbria University says education risks losing to algorithmic authority.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Generative AI isn&#039;t just changing how students learn \u2014 it&#039;s changing who controls knowledge itself.<\/p>\n<p>That&#039;s the warning from Kimberley Hardcastle, a business and marketing professor at the UK&#039;s Northumbria University.<\/p>\n<p>She told Business Insider that the rise of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in classrooms is shifting education&#039;s foundations in ways few institutions are prepared to confront.<\/p>\n<p>While schools and universities focus on plagiarism, grading, and AI literacy, Harcastle said the real risk lies deeper: in students and educators outsourcing judgment to algorithms built by Big Tech.<\/p>\n<h2>Students are outsourcing the thinking process<\/h2>\n<p>Data from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, shows just how deeply AI has entered the classroom.<\/p>\n<p>After analyzing about one million student conversations in April, the company found that 39.3% involved creating or polishing educational content, while 33.5% asked the chatbot to solve assignments directly.<\/p>\n<p>However, Hardcastle said this isn&#039;t just a case of students &quot;not doing the work.&quot; She said it&#039;s also about how knowledge itself is constructed.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When we bypass the cognitive journey of synthesis and critical evaluation, we&#039;re not just losing skills,&quot; she said. &quot;We&#039;re changing our epistemological relationship with knowledge itself.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>In other words, students are beginning to rely on AI not just to find answers but also to decide what counts as a good answer.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This affects job prospects not through reduced ability, but through a shifted cognitive framework where validation and creation of knowledge increasingly depend on AI mediation rather than human judgment,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<h2>The &#039;atrophy of epistemic vigilance&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>Hardcastle said her biggest concern is what she called the &quot;atrophy of epistemic vigilance&quot; \u2014 the ability to independently verify, challenge, and construct knowledge without the help of algorithms.<\/p>\n<p>As AI becomes more embedded in learning, she said, students risk losing the instinct to question sources, test assumptions, or think critically.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We&#039;re witnessing the first experimental cohort encountering AI mid-stream in their cognitive development, making them AI-displaced rather than AI-native learners,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We&#039;re witnessing a transformation in cognitive practices,&quot; she added.<\/p>\n<p>That loss could ripple beyond classrooms. If people stop practicing independent evaluation, society risks becoming dependent on algorithms as the arbiters of truth.<\/p>\n<h2>Big Tech&#039;s growing control over knowledge<\/h2>\n<p>Hardcastle warned that the deeper danger isn&#039;t just cognitive but structural.<\/p>\n<p>If AI systems become the primary mediators of knowledge, Big Tech companies effectively control what counts as valid knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The issue isn&#039;t dramatic control but subtle epistemic drift: when we consistently defer to AI-generated summaries and analyses, we inadvertently allow commercial training data and optimization metrics to shape what questions get asked and which methodologies appear valid,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>That drift, she said, risks entrenching corporate influence over how knowledge is created and validated \u2014 and quietly shifting authority from human judgment to algorithmic logic.<\/p>\n<h2>The stakes for education<\/h2>\n<p>Hardcastle said the question isn&#039;t whether education will &quot;fight back&quot; against AI, but whether it will consciously shape AI integration to preserve human epistemic agency \u2014 the capacity to think, reason, and judge independently.<\/p>\n<p>That requires educators to move beyond compliance and operational fixes, and to start asking fundamental questions about knowledge authority in an AI-mediated world, she said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#039;m less concerned about cohorts being &#039;worse off&#039; than about education missing this critical inflection point,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>Unless universities act deliberately, she said, AI could erode independent thought \u2014 while Big Tech profits from controlling how knowledge itself is created.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kimberley Hardcastle said generative AI is quietly shifting knowledge and critical thinking from humans to Big Tech&#039;s algorithms. Courtesy of Kimberley Hardcastle A professor warned that AI is making students dependent on Big Tech&#039;s algorithms for knowledge. Anthropic data shows students already use AI to write, edit, and even solve assignments directly. Kimberley Hardcastle of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}