The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Muira McCammon, whose focus is on AI chatbots, and particularly a chatbot called Stella, and its use in higher education. Unusually, this is a rule-based chatbot rather than a completely generative AI system. This and other chatbots are now also increasingly used by undergraduate students in higher education, and even embedded in university Websites; the implications of this still need to be understood.
Stella was brought onto campus at Tulane University in October 2023, unbeknownst to teaching staff themselves, and asks students two simple questions: how are you, and what makes you feel that way, when they log onto the Canvas course materials platform. Stella cannot be silenced or disconnected from Canvas, and feels like an anodyne interaction, but also proved a lightning rod for students offended by its incursions into privacy and bodily integrity. Students explored this in their responses, and whatever they did, the University seemed to fail to respond in any meaningful way to such explorations.
Students also complained, sometimes quite aggressively, in the undergraduate-run messaging board Fizz, and tried to figure out how to permanently disable Stella from Canvas; this provided useful insights both into how students sought to resist Stella itself, and how they attempted to navigate undergraduate student life overall.
Three distinct responses emerged: pessimism about the institution’s technological capabilities; collaborative coping strategies; and anti-panoptic information-sharing. In the absence of any meaningful responses from the university itself, in fact, one student even contacted the CEO of the Stella manufacturer via LinkedIn, and was indeed able to have themselves disconnected from Stella.
This study incorporated a Stella walkthrough, discursive analysis of Fizz debates, analysis of corporate information, and interviews with students. Students in particular felt sociotechnological helplessness, and alienation from their university; this points to a sense of discursive closure, where students evoked quiet, repetitive practices that function to maintain normalised, conflict-free social relations; their desire to disconnect remained largely unfulfilled, and did not translate into a broader reckoning with the institutional and technological settings they were exposed to.
