There’s a scene in a recording from a university lecture last October where a student named James just snaps. He’s sitting in a class at Staffordshire University, part of a government-funded program meant to turn adults into cybersecurity experts or software engineers, and he’s had enough of the slides.
“I know these slides are AI-generated,” he tells the lecturer. “I know that everyone in this meeting knows these slides are AI-generated. I would rather you just scrap these slides. I do not want to be taught by GPT.”
The lecturer laughs uncomfortably. Another student chimes in: “There are some useful things in the presentation. But it’s like, 5% is useful nuggets, and a lot is repetition. There is some gold in the bottom of this pan. But presumably we could get the gold ourselves, by asking ChatGPT.”
That’s the core problem here. James and 40 other students signed up for a course that was supposed to launch their digital careers. Instead, they got a lecturer who outsourced the teaching materials to an AI, then read those slides aloud—sometimes using an AI voiceover that couldn’t even keep its accent straight. One course video randomly switches from a British accent to a Spanish one for about 30 seconds, then back again.
Let me be clear: I’m not against using AI in education. Done right, it can be a useful tool for generating practice problems, providing personalized feedback, or helping students debug code. But this isn’t that. This is a lecturer who apparently generated a whole course with ChatGPT, barely edited the output, and then presented it as legitimate teaching material. The Guardian ran the course materials through two different AI detectors—Winston AI and Originality AI—and both flagged a “very high likelihood” that assignments and presentations were AI-generated.
The signs were obvious from day one. Students noticed American English that had been half-heartedly edited to British English. Suspicious file names. Generic, surface-level information that occasionally referenced US legislation for no reason. If you’ve ever seen the output of a language model that was prompted to write a university course, you know exactly what this looks like: broad, shallow, and full of filler.
James and Owen, two students who spoke to the Guardian, said they lost faith in the program. James worries he’s “used up two years” of his life on a course done “in the cheapest way possible.” He’s not wrong to feel that way. These are adults mid-career, trying to pivot into tech through a government-funded apprenticeship. They’re not 18-year-olds who can afford to waste a semester. They’re people who made a real investment of time and money, and they got an AI-generated slideshow in return.
What makes this worse is the hypocrisy. The university’s own policies limit students’ use of AI—outsourcing work to AI or passing off AI-generated work as your own is considered academic misconduct. But the same rules apparently don’t apply to the people running the course. As James put it: “If we handed in stuff that was AI-generated, we would be kicked out of the uni, but we’re being taught by an AI.”
Staffordshire University isn’t alone here. A survey by the educational technology firm Jisc found that nearly a quarter of higher education teaching staff are using AI tools in their teaching. The UK’s Department of Education published a policy paper in August praising generative AI’s potential to “transform education.” And on Reddit, students are increasingly complaining about lecturers copying and pasting ChatGPT feedback or using AI-generated images in courses.
But here’s the thing: transformation is supposed to be an improvement. What’s happening at Staffordshire isn’t transformation—it’s cost-cutting dressed up as innovation. The university even uploaded a policy statement to the course website this year that appears to justify using AI, laying out “a framework for academic professionals leveraging AI automation” in scholarly work and teaching. Translation: we’re going to keep doing this, and here’s the paperwork to make it look intentional.
I get it. Lecturers are overworked and underpaid. The pressure to produce course materials quickly is real. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool to help you teach better and using it to replace the work of teaching entirely. A lecturer who generates slides with ChatGPT and then reads them aloud isn’t teaching. They’re narrating a robot’s homework.
The students confronted university officials multiple times. Nothing changed. James raised his concerns during a monthly meeting with the student representative. Then he confronted the lecturer directly, on camera. The response from the student rep: “We have fed this back, James, and the response was that teachers are allowed to use a variety of tools.”
That’s not a response. That’s a brush-off. And it tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the university is taking this.
I’ve been in tech long enough to know that AI is going to change how we teach and learn. But the people pushing this technology need to remember that education isn’t just about information delivery. It’s about mentorship, context, and the human ability to say “that’s interesting, let me explain why.” A language model can’t do that. It can only generate more text.
James said it best: “I’m midway through my life, my career. I don’t feel like I can now just go away and do another career restart. I’m stuck with this course.”
He shouldn’t have to be stuck with a course that treats him like a testing ground for automation. And the rest of us shouldn’t pretend this is okay just because it’s efficient.
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