Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?
There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.
Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.
I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.
I guess I should qualify that, many professors are ambivalent regarding AI, but some view it as an existential threat to their profession. Most here are scrambling to figure out ways to work around it if not incorporate some AI into the curriculum, since every student has access to ChapGPT and many also have access to CoPilot.
Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.
As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.