Critical education, generative artificial intelligence and the tyranny of freedom: a critique of modern ‘technocracy’

This paper provides a critical analysis of Gen-AI technologies, questioning their role as the liberators of learning. Much has already been written about Gen-AI, but little has been said regarding its purported temporal efficiency as a tool of intellectual freedom. This paper casts doubt on the value of this efficiency, delivering a critique of Gen-AI technological freedom as a dubious virtue at best, a form of freedom that offers little to the development of critical learning and reasoning capacities. This critique is grounded in a Freirean approach to critical education, one that understands the concept of learner freedom or learner autonomy as a socially constructed and collective endeavour. The paper outlines this position by discussing key elements of Freire’s thinking, including notions of problematisation, critical dialogue and acts of knowing. It concludes by suggesting potential alternatives to what Freire called the ‘tyranny of freedom’ in the application of educational technologies.