How AI exposes the moral hypocrisy of academic publishing

"One hint about Informa’s intentions can be found in a linguistic pivot from the 2024 to the 2025 report. In 2024 there was talk of “flexible Pay-to-Publish Open Research platforms”. That language is absent from the 2025 report. Now that governments are less interested in paying for humanities academics to publish, it is a reasonable inference that Informa is looking to replace lost revenue with money from training AIs. Scholars fret about the sloppy academic referencing of AI text. An AI with full access to the Taylor & Francis back catalogue can almost certainly improve on the referencing of distracted humanists anxious about their jobs.

Herein lies the hypocrisy. We punish students for using AI, even as we gift our own research to a business that directly feeds it into the very models that we caution students against using — all of this without compensation, consent or even awareness. If anyone’s cheating, it’s not the students. The challenge for the humanities isn’t to either abet or beat AI detection tools. It’s to reimagine a scholarly ecosystem with AI where truth-seeking is collaborative, transparent and fair. That starts with confronting the uncomfortable truths not just about our students, but about ourselves."