15 Jan 2026

Truth or Consequences

by Jídé Salawu

Illustration by Joe MacLeod

In an interview for an adjunct professor position last summer, I was asked how I have been treating students who write with AI or bots in my class. Though I prepared for the interview for days I confess I did not take that question seriously in my preparation, because so far, I have not seen a case I could flag for such a misdemeanor. There would be little sense in enrolling in a class dedicated to original thought, making claims based on narratives and texts, and substantiating them with evidence from those texts, if we mean to respond to those requirements merely by asking ChatGPT to “write” for us—that is, to mash together ideas generated by others into a rough semblance of meanings not our own.

A better question to ask is, how do we approach increasingly urgent questions of integrity and credibility?

For more than a year now I have taught at the University of Alberta, where we now have AI policies in place; teachers are adding their personal statements on AI usage to their pages and syllabi. Last fall I taught a course dedicated to the Black geographies of Afro-Canadian migrants and subjects. We read Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and the filmmaker Shelagh Mackenzie, who worked on the 1991 documentary Remember Africville. I found I needed to dissuade my students from using AI to generate scholarly sources due to the risk of errors.

I learnt at the feet of the old folks, whose idea of intellectual labour and dignity is rooted in the originality and energy put into an idea. There may be some romantic bias in this view, which leads ineluctably to the conviction that using a machine as an aid in thinking is like a shortcut—or a cheat, if you want to call it that. But AI is here with us now, and we must grapple with its immediate and far-reaching implications in a serious way. Whether or not you support traditional forms of study doesn’t change how the world’s progress and the steady growth of human society must rely on our authentic thoughts and innovations, shaking up the meanings inherent in earlier narratives, images, and policies.