University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI

It’s an abbreviated article that I refuse to pay to access, but as a (former) academic - and a student before that, obviously - this is beyond concerning.

I also do language research and know the importance of training data, but this has all the appearances of a naked cash grab from an institution who nominally justifies its existence on educating students and conducting research. I was never even fully comfortable with commercial funding for academic research (unless they fully disassociated the commercial aspect from the funding and open sourced the results), but this seems beyond the pale.

I’m not even comfortable if they got “informed consent,” because those forms are so often misunderstood and signing them feels like forced compliance. I’m absolutely against it if they didn’t even go that far.

So if they want to show good faith, all of the deans and administrators of U of M should make recordings of all of their phone calls, meetings, and schedules available for research purposes.