\n<\/p>\n
When I\u00a0first saw the email with the subject line \u201cTurn your paper into a Spotify podcast,\u201d I\u00a0thought it was a joke. When I\u00a0realized it wasn\u2019t, I\u00a0deleted it immediately, as though its very presence in my inbox might be contagious. But like a child peering at a scary scene through her fingers, I\u00a0couldn\u2019t unsee or ignore it, so I\u00a0opened my trash folder to reckon with it:<\/p>\n
\u201cHi\u00a0Joelle, <\/p>\n
\u201cYour paper \u2018A hstorian\u2019s [sic<\/em>] take on Charlottesville:\u00a0\u2026\u2019 can now be shared as a Spotify podcast. Reach new audiences and make your research heard.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d forgotten about Academia.edu, an online repository popular particularly with grad students and emerging scholars. I\u2019d created an account years ago when I\u00a0moved to Boston and was constantly searching for teaching gigs. When I\u00a0logged in after receiving this recent email, I\u00a0found four of my articles on the site, none of which I\u00a0remember uploading. I\u00a0certainly didn\u2019t give explicit permission for the company to turn my work into a podcast, but as it turns out, I\u00a0didn\u2019t need to. Users of Academia.edu or any online platform should read the terms and conditions carefully, particularly when it comes to AI. And users who care about accuracy, attribution and learning should delete their accounts.<\/p>\n Academia.edu has been sketchy for a while. It no doubt purchased the .edu domain because it wanted to pose as an educational nonprofit, rather than the for-profit institution it really is. Since its founding in 2008, Academia.edu has received funding from corporate investors such as Tencent Holdings, Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures in a bid to compete with other online platforms such as ResearchGate.<\/p>\n That competition prompted Academia.edu to team up with Spotify to release podcasts derived from papers in its database. I\u00a0couldn\u2019t listen to the podcast derived from my own paper without becoming a premium member of Academia.edu, and I\u00a0won\u2019t give the site money. But I\u00a0could listen to other similar podcasts for free. Each one starts with CEO Richard Price introducing himself and talking about the cool new research that the episode features. Except it\u2019s not actually Price\u2014it\u2019s an AI-generated voice with natural pauses and intonation.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more disingenuous and problematic is that AI\u00a0also paraphrases the papers\u2019 findings and arguments to make them more accessible to a bigger audience. The use of AI\u00a0can introduce idiosyncrasies and errors into the podcasts. Other academics have reported that the podcasts contain AI-contrived non sequiturs, such as the host randomly commenting on drinking a coffee in Prague or falsehoods or arguments that directly contradict those of the author.<\/p>\n Given how many academics would recoil at the use of their work in this way, Academia.edu changed its terms and conditions so we didn\u2019t need to consent. The company made a controversial rights grab in September 2025, when it asserted that the creation of an account gave it the rights to \u201cuse your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, under those terms, the existence of an Academia.edu account gave the company permission to commit fraud in the name of the scholars it purports to help.<\/p>\n Users pushed back on the new terms and got Academia.edu to drop its claim on name, voice, signature and likeness. Remaining in the terms, however, is the provision that users grant Academia.edu the right to use AI\u00a0\u201cto generate adaptations and other derivative works of Member Content.\u201d In addition to podcasts, Academia.edu scrapes content to generate \u201cfireside chats\u201d and personalized comics as well.<\/p>\n Many users deleted their accounts. Others, like me, had no idea any of this was happening until now. Academia.edu banks on the ignorance of users, especially inactive ones. There is a setting to turn off AI\u2019s access to your material, but that\u2019s not helpful for users who didn\u2019t know about it or whose work has already been harvested.<\/p>\n It\u2019s bad enough that AI\u00a0can scrape, transform and misrepresent one\u2019s work, but the availability of the resulting podcast on Spotify further twists the knife. Spotify hosts misinformation machines such as Joe Rogan, and it\u2019s advertised for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Anyone who is still on Academia.edu and cares about the integrity of their work or about the consequences of companies using AI\u00a0to plunder and commodify academia and research should delete their account, now. <\/p>\n Many educators like me worry about the use of AI\u00a0to destabilize foundations of knowledge and learning. We\u2019re concerned about the erosion of critical thinking, metacognition, reading comprehension and other essential skills. We\u2019re concerned about companies and institutions forcing AI\u00a0down the throats of faculty, students and anyone who uses the internet. We\u2019re concerned about the \u201cSpotify-cation\u201d of knowledge, as though listening to a series of AI-generated podcasts constitutes learning. <\/p>\n These types of AI\u00a0commodify and devalue learning, and they do so by design. Scraping the web and turning my paper into a podcast that\u2019s delivered without human fact-checking or invention doesn\u2019t facilitate education. Academics and their scholarship shouldn\u2019t be collateral damage in the world of AI. More importantly, neither should students or anyone attempting to learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I\u00a0first saw the email with the subject line \u201cTurn your paper into a Spotify podcast,\u201d I\u00a0thought it was a joke. When I\u00a0realized it wasn\u2019t, I\u00a0deleted it immediately, as though its very presence in my inbox might be contagious. But like a child peering at a scary scene through her fingers, I\u00a0couldn\u2019t unsee or ignore<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[14018,1326,440,515,9464],"class_list":{"0":"post-46465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-dont","10":"tag-opinion","11":"tag-podcast","12":"tag-turned"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}