AI is a tool inside capitalism to replace human labor with machinery. Using it and trying to control it politically is part of our struggle to survive/thrive in the context of increasing control of our world by investors in capital accumulation. Keeping that reality in the curriculum and in all kinds of knowledge production will make AI useful as a tool for progressive education and cultural creativity.
I am glad that I have retired. I do think however that system-fixing at the level you describe is not something I would focus on as an activist academic; rather, I would concentrate on providing the best critical knowledge I can muster using technologies that fit the purpose. The capitalist drive to mass- produce standardized technical problem-solvers with vision limited to jobs presented to them by the system — which constitutes their everyday practical reality — what they call “the real world” — is obviously a most important subject for critical scrutiny. The real world of Hindutva hyper-capitalism is the problem they must deal with. Arming them for that struggle is a worthy project that I can now only engage through writing.
I personally appreciate the labor-saving that AI provides for my research: it provides a useful starting point for access to all kinds of information and online resources. It has substantially replaced the library reference. room, but rmains denied access to most reference sources that lie behind pay-walls, such as the Oxford University Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (of which I am general editor). Its modes of analysis, explanation, and interpretatio rely on its scrubbing the most popular and most energetiically propagated online ideas. With that in mind, I would ask students to produce a text using AI to address a controversial problem — my favorite is this: “Explain the 1947 Partition of British India” — and compose a critical analysis of that text, based on all their course readings, presentations, and discussions.