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Abstract

This article examines how feminist pedagogy can intervene in AI-saturated classrooms by foregrounding refusal, embodiment, and critical engagement with what I term the muddy algorithms of generative systems. As institutions increasingly normalize AI as an inevitable educational tool, this work challenges that assumption by situating AI within broader structures of power, labor, and extraction. Drawing on classroom experiences in media and communication courses, I use the case of Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress,” to explore how automation reproduces gendered expectations of availability, consent, and creative labor. The concept of muddy algorithms names the opaque, uneven, and value-laden processes through which AI systems are trained and deployed. Rather than presenting outputs as neutral or efficient, this framework emphasizes the social, environmental, and political conditions embedded within algorithmic production. Through guided discussions, process-based assignments, and critical analysis of AI-generated content, students are encouraged to interrogate authorship, agency, and the infrastructures that sustain AI systems. Methodologically, this article draws on reflective teaching practice, student writing, and classroom dialogue as sites of inquiry. Findings suggest that when students are invited to critically engage rather than passively adopt AI tools, they develop a more nuanced understanding of technological systems as contingent and contestable. Students articulate tensions between convenience and autonomy, often recognizing how AI mirrors rather than replaces their own perspectives while simultaneously absorbing and reshaping creative labor. This work contributes to scholarship on AI and pedagogy by offering refusal as a deliberate slowing down that creates space for critique. In doing so, it argues that feminist pedagogy remains essential for navigating AI’s integration into education, ensuring that questions of power, embodiment, and justice remain central to how these technologies are taught and understood.

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