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The AI Zombification of Universities

The AI Zombification of Universities

rmdmphilosopher

Comments (152)

  • Lerc
    If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation.If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem even worse.These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.
  • curiousllama
    Over a decade ago, my orientation at UChicago included the traditional "Aims of Education" address. They packed the whole first-year class into the chapel to explain, at length, that this education will not be "useful."You're not supposed to make more money, or be happier, or really become anything other than a better version of yourself.I wonder if they still do this.
  • drmanhat
    Oddly enough my reaction to this is that it's a broader societal problem as opposed to an A.I. problem.Why shouldn't universities switch to examinations where no technology (apart from say calculators) are allowed; and this is strictly enforced? This was certainly the norm when I went to university.I agree that A.I. trivializes (or changes how you approach) a lot of take home work; but people who wanted to cheat could more or less always do so for that to some degree. I guess it makes it easier to do so; however my expectation would be a greater reliance or weighting on in person examinations as a response; as opposed to a normalization of cheating.One way in which A.I. could be seen as contributing to this is that it is devaluing the importance of what were seen as 'intellectual' pursuits; as we now have automation for them that is at the very least often surface level effective for undergraduate work.
  • chung8123
    The college system is creating the zombie underclass with AI or without it. The amount of money colleges charge combined with the text book thinking shapes people into thinking there are steps to success, there are right answers, and "getting a job" is the right way to go. Colleges don't teach independent thinking and that is the exact thinking we need in the era of Youtube and AI. You don't need college to teach you how to learn text book items anymore and I think that is scary to some.
  • bawolff
    It does feel like there is an easy solution to this:Have tests.Supervise said tests to make sure people don't cheat.That's how it worked when i was in university. Admittedly maybe that is easier in the sciences than humanities, but still, it seems doable. Cheating isn't a new phenomenon it just got cheaper and easier.
  • llbbdd
    It's going to be interesting to see where universities are in ten years. Higher education has for a long time been a bad proxy for internships and apprenticeships, because if you aren't teaching what the market is paying for then you don't get funding or students. Watching universities start to defend against this obvious and accelerating association is fascinating. There's an obvious decoupling between "learning how to do a job" and "higher education for fun because I'm rich" that we're only going to see getting crazier.
  • dgellow
    Overall it’s a very good read, really enjoyed the author voice and style> I don’t think she was laughing two years later when I was TAing the class and we observed a fairly distinct gap of about 40 percentage points between the take-home test and the one administered in-person.40pp is massive. Take homes are pretty much dead at that point. And not just in schools, but also for interviews. I don’t see how you can get a meaningful signal, it’s guaranteed they will be made using AI.
  • bloppe
    Back in my day, we did the learning in class, and the evaluation (homework, projects, but sometimes even exams) at home. Seems like AI just flips the script. Now, you can learn anything you want with a private tutor. The teacher can just upload the entire course material to a place where the LLM can rag over it and answer anybody's questions. Learn it on your own time. Then, use class time for evaluation. Do the "homework" in class. Take proctored tests without access to the internet, etc.
  • arjie
    Universities have the greatest discrepancy to me between how they're described from those who are no longer associated with them or who are weakly associated with them and the reality of those who are dependent on them as employees or as students. To listen to the alumni, every university was an institute of learning where all standards were held to the highest and everyone adhered to every rule to the letter.To the majority of students, they seem quite laser focused on acquiring the degree with the right grades so that they can maximize their chance of a job after university (apart from the personal element of partying and having a boy/girl-friend etc.). The primary utility of the university to students is the credentialing, and secondarily the structure to the learning program, but otherwise the books themselves suffice to teach.Perhaps we should move more training to technical institutes and people can come out with the knowledge of how to operate this or that thing. The problem is that everyone will know that the smarter student has gone for the higher-end university. The credentialing then works not because of the program but because of the selection that the university can do. Okay, so the whole thing continues to make sense even if AI zombifies everything.
  • paulorlando
    Profs can push back on this if they want. Not all of them want to (or want to justify pushback given their pay).For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.
  • chasd00
    the screenshot with formulas and then, in the middle of it all, "wait let me be more careful" had me laughing to myself.
  • QuadmasterXLII
    The universities can survive a wave of student ai laziness- blue books and pass fail homework. cfg. I can’t see how they survive a wave of professor ai laziness. Paying $200,000 for $40 of tokens is such a brutal way to be scammed and the resentment will get refreshed by loan payments every month for decades
  • pvillano
    I'm a big fan of the fact that the following quoted sentence has 25 words before the verb. An LLM would never. I probably wouldn't.> Whatever your conception of the modern university, whether grand or grim, understanding the current landscape of campus-wide AI use, much less its intensification, should destroy it.
  • cdrnsf
    AI really does destroy everything it touches.
  • jimbokun
    > The buildings, of course, will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent.Ouch.
  • savgore
    I wrote something along very similar lines recently! Even the zombie metaphor is quite close.https://pistolas.co.uk/work-that-need-not-be/
  • paulpauper
    Universities will still act as gatekeepers of prestige and status. There is no AI alternative to the top-20 schools...I remember all the hype from 10-15 years ago about how online learning and "MIT courseware" would upend the universities or threaten credentialism, and nothing even close to that happened. As it turned out, the online version of MIT is not a substitute for the actual thing.Schools will adapt, as they have already, by weighing grading more towards in-class quizzes and tests . I think the humanities will continue to struggle, but I see the AI boom making STEM more relevant, even if AI can automate a lot of code or math.
  • JumpCrisscross
    > Tying education to a capital-intensive and (likely soon to be) tightly regulated technology is one more step toward a different, frightening future. A world in which independent educational institutions are neutered and transformed by their reliance on a central authority into factories designed to train students according to the “needs of society” is not a new prospect — it has been the persistent dream of Fabians, technocrats, and engineers…I hadn’t thought of this. Every school district and university tied into centralized AI inherently undermined its ability to decide how its kids are to be taught.
  • stonlyb
    I'm a current student, who also happens to be a full-time professional who is "all in on AI", and I think most are missing the true opportunities AI opens up for education.Because my student path is non-linear (vs just following a life script), I may be a bit weird / not the average student, but it's especially true for me that I'm very intentional about actually learning the things I sign up for classes to learn.My point is that I'm not taking classes just for the motions or to create slop. With that context, here is how AI helped me very specifically in a recent linear algebra course:1. I was able to prompt very specific questions, usually audits of my work, in ways that provided responses that were more like a socratic tutor and not a cheating parter. In this way I did not need to bother my professor as much or seek out a tutor, when I was stuck. But I also didnt shortcut my way to answers. I was intentionally limiting the AI assistance to finding small errors or jogging my memory about steps missed or next steps.2. I vibe coded a note taking web application (started as a chrome plugin for notion) so that I could shortcode and pick math symbols while my other arm was full holding my newborn (yes I'm a dad too). This has since evolved into a full-on science writing platform that I love whether or not anyone else ever uses it (though I am trying to turn it into a business). Maybe I actually ended up adding more work to my math class but it added a layer to the learning (what math symbols are needed, what are typical patterns for this subject, etc) that I think helped with my overall absorbtion of the subject.I dont know if #2 is transposable to other students or to other subjects but I imagine there is some version of a double major yet to be created that is Core Subject + "how to properly use AI to learn (including vibe coding tools to help yourself and other students)".There are many other smaller ways AI can be used to help learning (flash cards, generated quizzes, etc) that are oft mentioned but that articles like this gloss over.Having said that, I loved reading this (so well written it could not be AI despite the emdashes), and especially appreciate any mention of "The Whispering Earring", which is one of my spinning tops to remind me to remain vigilant of my cognitive health despite my almost complete embrace of AI.
  • overgard
    I can't help but wonder if the fundamental problem is just that we spent decades pretending that a university degree was some sort of useful job training in the first place. As a professional software developer, I think my computer science degree is not actually all that important. Sure there are some relevant concepts, but they're ones you'd pick up on the job anyway.I don't regret getting my degree (back in 2009), but I think requiring a person to have one is a dumb job requirement.Frankly, we shouldn't have so many people going to university in the first place. There's a lot of people it's just utterly wasted on, and it drags down the entire apparatus as a result. In a sane society we'd have much more apprenticeships, vocational training, etc.
  • mrbluecoat
  • gverrilla
    Zombification of USA people was already happening before AI. Not surprisingly, it's been one of the favorite cultural themes in the country's cultural produce for long years. Zombies + superheroes was not poised to produce great non-drooling non-moron americans.
  • cjs_ac
    > There is an extreme idealist view of education that might see the threat of AI as good precisely because it could transform those kids — the former connoisseurs of SparkNotes and Mathway, the ones snickering in lectures and inking formulas onto their palms before exams before the rise of generative AI — into zombies lurching and stumbling their way into the “permanent underclass” (as the tech bros say), leaving the elect few free to enjoy the benefits of a humanist education without all the noise and din.In this world, what are the benefits of a humanist education? The only reason we care so much about education is that it's how to determine merit in meritocratic societies, and therefore a key part in how people gain social status. In a world where AI does all the knowledge work and robots do all the physical work, with an 'elect few' owning everything and everyone else in a 'permanent underclass', why do the elect few even need to keep the permanent underclass alive?
  • 0xkvyb
    I think that universities just have to adapt to deal with slop, or think of new ways to challenge people to learn the essence of their studies. I wouldn’t want to be a uni teacher in these times though.
  • nwhnwh
    > The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons...Modern education is like that, even before AI. Check this https://www.jstor.org/stable/25006902
  • ls612
    This whole piece is AI generated.
  • erelong
    Kinda glad to see it as universities have made a mockery of education and learning for decades; hoping AI just replaces them altogether