ChatGPT has gained a practical importance in aiding students with academic tasks, i.e., writing essays, synthesizing difficult theories, and generating ideas for class related projects. Recent observations and analysis of academics suggests that students rely significantly on artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT to ease the academic pressures of having to read long articles and original works, formulate and write essays for subjects that require submissions of reflective and argumentative papers. The goal of this paper, however, is not to critique the impact of ChatGPT in the classroom, but to argue that AI interfaces and platforms like this confirms Louis Althusser’s thesis that education as an ideological state apparatus (ISA) turns to a mechanism that reproduces the mode of production. Althusser contends that education legitimizes and reproduces the consumerist social formation. As can be known, this thrust could be discerned from the direction of the Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) which most educational systems adapted around the world for practical purpose of ensuring quality graduates. For Althusser, besides the need to “manufacture consent” among the people, the means of production has to be secured which is accomplished by “educating” and training the learner to eventually become inducted to the labor force. Thus, the students themselves are victimized by the relentless pursuit of reproducing workers to maintain capitalist interests. This work will, therefore, argue that given the thrust of education as objective or outcomes-based, the learner begins to perceive learning through the lenses of outcomes and achievements which overlooks the process of knowledge generation.

Keywords: Outcomes-Based Education, Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence