4 ms·

The role of the University is to resist AI

67 points by milen 1y ago

lucyjojo 1y ago
there is a relatively simple way to somewhat deal with AI in a sensible way. stop using evaluations as filters. sharing marks or even reporting them. simply give marks to the students for self-evaluations. That until they can make something of real value towards the later years. And evaluate that. It could be of the form of they want, they could use AI at will for that, but it would be presented in person in front of a panel. You could even have a few of these walls but all of them should be toward the end, where AI does not trivialize the task. Let students repeat if they want, pass if they want, go back a grade if they want, even skip a grade if they want. You will have to make them aware that there will be huge walls at the end though. That would be my naive approach to that. Until something better gets established.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
varelse 1y ago
[dead]
tempodox 1y ago
> Society can't throw up its hands in shock as students outsource their thinking to simulation machines when fifty years of neoliberalism has masticated education into something homogenised, metricised and machinic. Meanwhile, so-called Ed Tech has claimed for decades that learning is informational rather than relational and ripe for technical disruption. So university cannot effectively resist AI without resisting these ideas first. I hope it can be done.
bachmeier 1y ago
I can kind of see the author's point, though I don't agree with it. AI is what made the problems obvious. Students didn't start cheating with the appearance of AI chatbots. My view is that university classes should be taught in such a way that students can use AI as much or as little as they desire in order to learn the material. Evaluation should primarily be done in the classroom without access to AI. 90% of the grade in my undergraduate course comes from in-person exams. I don't care how they learned the material. This can be a problem for composition classes, for instance, but the problem existed long before the chatbots. > AI is actually a giant material infrastructure with huge demands for energy, water and concrete, while the supply chain for specialised computer chips is entangled with geopolitical conflict. It also means that the AI industry will beg, borrow and steal, or basically just steal, all the text, images and audio that it can get its spidery hands on. Sure. We don't know yet how the economics will play out. We don't know the actual cost of LLM and other AI services, we only know what companies are currently charging for them, but they're competing for mindshare so the prices are most definitely being held low. To a large extent, the whole thing has demonstrated what can be done in the short-term in the absence of copyright restrictions, and now we have to see the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions. I agree with many of the points in the article but don't understand how that turns into a recommendation to "resist".
- trod1234 1y ago
  Wouldn't we be just in the first phase of the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions? The second phase being copyright claimed on the model itself, and its derivative works thus further expanding copyright paradoxically to things which couldn't be before the blackbox, and only allowing use by those who own the models? Initially things are always rosy, then they are reduced to make profit and create moats.
- _feus 1y ago
  I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be. One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example: Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write". Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising. Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in." Genius!
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353422
Akranazon 1y ago
Thank you. This author's writing is a careful exemplar of everything rotten about higher ed. The article is a great compilation of features, stylistic and material, that need to be crushed and discarded from the university.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  I'm not in Academia myself. But why do some people (you) get white hot with rage about the people that are in it?
  - Akranazon 1y ago
    American universities are important institutions and do a lot of good work. However, look no further than this article for the source of the "white hot rage". It's bloviating, vacuous, empty fluff, no meaningful point or persuasive argument, and the statements which come the closest to resembling coherent points are wrong and bad (see https://www.danmcquillan.org/questions_for_anthropic.html https://www.danmcquillan.org/questions_for_anthropic.html). The author feels threatened, because he realizes that an AI could do his writing style much better than he does, given the absence of original thought. The author is a kind of free-rider: he persists in his position having read just-enough continental philosophy, and memorized the right incantations (buzzwords) to communicate the "aligned" political subtext. Academic left-wing jargon; you have to be against neoliberalism, "tech broligarchy", Palantir (the military industrial complex), technogenesis... Oh, and you have to shoehorn as many race politics subjects into your article on AI, even if they have virtually nothing to do with the topic (KKK, White Genocide, racial superiority, supremacy, eugenics). Points for creativity, I guess.
    - lawlessone 1y ago
      I thought his reference to the AI being neutral on the KKK was relevant as it demonstrated the AI just doesn't really understand what it talks about.
      - Akranazon 1y ago
PeterStuer 1y ago
There is a serious discussion to be had on the impacts of AI, and it's effects on how to approach education, the role of academia in AI research etc. Sadly, this article, or lets be honest, rant, is not a contribution to that.
- 4ndrewl 1y ago
  Because?
fallinditch 1y ago
That's a lot of words for one practical recommendation: University councils for discussing 'AI conviviality'. I think the author presents a one dimensional view of AI bad and fails to see the bigger picture, which is ironic considering all the fine words he uses. I agree that AI tools can potentially weaken some of our lower level cognitive functions, but on the flip side the AI tools also enable us to operate on higher levels of ability, planning, conceptualization and execution. This is undoubtedly a point of inflexion for Universities: they should be working out how they can achieve a new deal for students and society that is far more nuanced and constructive than mere 'resistance' against AI.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 1y ago
  That's really the only tangible recommendation in the article. The real problem for universities is this: much of what classical academia claims is important is not all that hard for a LLM. Writing "compare and contrast" student papers, research which consists of digging through existing texts and summarizing, and writing in a formal style are all things LLMs do. Probably better than most undergraduates. This shakes the philosophical foundations of academia. What are universities for now? Job training? Sorting the winners from the losers? Something else?
- mariusor 1y ago
  > but on the flip side the AI tools also enable us to operate on higher levels of ability, planning, conceptualization and execution. Are there any concrete examples of this? Did any researcher, engineer, artist, etc come forwards and say: "yes, this work you esteem so much, was created by me with the help of AI"? To me, your words sound more of wishful thinking than the situation as is currently. I'm willing to be set right though.
Imnimo 1y ago
>Generative AI's main impact on higher education has been to cause panic about students cheating, a panic that diverts attention from the already immiserated experience of marketised studenthood. It's also caused increasing alarm about staff cheating, via AI marking and feedback, which again diverts attention from their experience of relentless and ongoing precaritisation. >The hegemonic narrative calls for universities to embrace these tools as a way to revitalise pedagogy, and because students will need AI skills in the world of work. A major flaw with this story is that the tools don't actually work, or at least not as claimed. >AI summarisation doesn't summarise; it simulates a summary based on the learned parameters of its model. AI research tools don't research; they shove a lot of searched-up docs into the chatbot context in the hope that will trigger relevancy. For their part, so-called reasoning models ramp up inference costs while confabulating a chain of thought to cover up their glaring limitations. If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? It seems like that would be a problem that would solve itself - a student would attempt to use AI to cheat, it would fail to complete the assignment, and the student would get a bad grade.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? Cheating doesn't have to work for it to be cheating. If you get caught robbing a bank that doesn't un-rob the bank.
  - Imnimo 1y ago
    But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue.
    - lawlessone 1y ago
      >But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue. We have police and prisons yet people still commit crimes.
      - 1y ago
trollbridge 1y ago
Teach, and require, students to handwrite (without a machine such as a smartphone or a PC nearby) whatever quizzes and homework and exams they need to do. Of course, this would mean professors and TAs would have to actually go back to hand-scoring work, instead of lazily leaving it up to their classroom management software. Beyond that written work, more of what universities examine of students should be students actually standing up and speaking about their work (without a machine assisting them).
karaterobot 1y ago
> The way this technology works means that generative AI applied to anything is a form of slopification, of turning things into slop. However, where AI is undoubtedly successful is as a shock doctrine, as a way to further precaritise workers and privatise services. You can't say both that AI produces worse results, and that it will be used to manipulate the job market: savvy companies would outcompete by not adopting AI, and hiring up the victims of AI layoffs. If either of his statements is true, the other is false. This whole article, man. I don't know where to start with it. It definitely reminds me of grad school. In a bad way. The university has been on a glide path toward irrelevance for quite a while—long before AI was a going concern—and the humanities and social sciences, in particular, have been skimming the treetops since at least when I was in school at the turn of the century. The role of the university is to teach and do research. AI can be a tremendous asset for both of those, and it's not going away, so deal with that reality.
dismalaf 1y ago
The role of university isn't to resist nor embrace. When I was in university, I did finance + economics + a bunch of other random stuff from CS to archaeology to philosophy. One subject that was interesting from a technology standpoint was statistics. I took university at a point when ML was a thing, but LLMs obviously weren't. R was a thing, Python was beginning to get popular in the domain, you potentially had all sorts of tech to help with stats. Introduction to stats, no technology was allowed. Every single problem was done by hand. Every single quiz and test, no calculators, no multiple choice, just problems to work through by hand. If you cheated on assignments, you'd obviously fail tests (which were >50% of the course). Problem solved. We had to learn without aids. Second stats course, everything was allowed. Did all my assignments with R. The point was simply learning. First theory, then how it's done on the real world. University absolutely should teach all the theories, concepts and history before AI. And then it should also teach how to use AI, since it's a thing in the real world. People just need to stop thinking about university as all about grades and check marks, and learn to learn.
waffletower 1y ago
We keep hearing the argument that AI datasets are built via "stealing"; it is as if the Fair use doctrine does not exist. Large copyright holders are the obvious beneficiaries of such denials, and perhaps the OP isn't just a mindless parrot on this point, but an active participant in intentional subterfuge. Copyright infringement can occur at the output, not at the input of AI models, people. For the author to be ethically consistent on this point, they would never use a university library ever again.
currymj 1y ago
this article contains some reasonable points about problems caused both by concrete advances in AI and by rhetoric about AI used to justify the decisions of the powerful. the focus is especially on AI-based end-user technology being sold to consumers and institutions. it seems to miss the point that some members of the university community may actually do research on AI, and may not feel inclined to ask for approval from the “People’s Council” to get permission to think about concepts in statistics, computer science, or decision theory.

67 points by milen 1y ago

there is a relatively simple way to somewhat deal with AI in a sensible way. stop using evaluations as filters. sharing marks or even reporting them. simply give marks to the students for self-evaluations. That until they can make something of real value towards the later years. And evaluate that. It could be of the form of they want, they could use AI at will for that, but it would be presented in person in front of a panel. You could even have a few of these walls but all of them should be toward the end, where AI does not trivialize the task. Let students repeat if they want, pass if they want, go back a grade if they want, even skip a grade if they want. You will have to make them aware that there will be huge walls at the end though. That would be my naive approach to that. Until something better gets established.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

varelse 1y ago

[dead]

tempodox 1y ago

> Society can't throw up its hands in shock as students outsource their thinking to simulation machines when fifty years of neoliberalism has masticated education into something homogenised, metricised and machinic. Meanwhile, so-called Ed Tech has claimed for decades that learning is informational rather than relational and ripe for technical disruption. So university cannot effectively resist AI without resisting these ideas first. I hope it can be done.

bachmeier 1y ago

I can kind of see the author's point, though I don't agree with it. AI is what made the problems obvious. Students didn't start cheating with the appearance of AI chatbots. My view is that university classes should be taught in such a way that students can use AI as much or as little as they desire in order to learn the material. Evaluation should primarily be done in the classroom without access to AI. 90% of the grade in my undergraduate course comes from in-person exams. I don't care how they learned the material. This can be a problem for composition classes, for instance, but the problem existed long before the chatbots. > AI is actually a giant material infrastructure with huge demands for energy, water and concrete, while the supply chain for specialised computer chips is entangled with geopolitical conflict. It also means that the AI industry will beg, borrow and steal, or basically just steal, all the text, images and audio that it can get its spidery hands on. Sure. We don't know yet how the economics will play out. We don't know the actual cost of LLM and other AI services, we only know what companies are currently charging for them, but they're competing for mindshare so the prices are most definitely being held low. To a large extent, the whole thing has demonstrated what can be done in the short-term in the absence of copyright restrictions, and now we have to see the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions. I agree with many of the points in the article but don't understand how that turns into a recommendation to "resist".

trod1234 1y ago
Wouldn't we be just in the first phase of the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions? The second phase being copyright claimed on the model itself, and its derivative works thus further expanding copyright paradoxically to things which couldn't be before the blackbox, and only allowing use by those who own the models? Initially things are always rosy, then they are reduced to make profit and create moats.
_feus 1y ago
I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be. One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example: Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write". Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising. Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in." Genius!

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353422

Akranazon 1y ago

Thank you. This author's writing is a careful exemplar of everything rotten about higher ed. The article is a great compilation of features, stylistic and material, that need to be crushed and discarded from the university.

lawlessone 1y ago
I'm not in Academia myself. But why do some people (you) get white hot with rage about the people that are in it?
- Akranazon 1y ago
  American universities are important institutions and do a lot of good work. However, look no further than this article for the source of the "white hot rage". It's bloviating, vacuous, empty fluff, no meaningful point or persuasive argument, and the statements which come the closest to resembling coherent points are wrong and bad (see https://www.danmcquillan.org/questions_for_anthropic.html https://www.danmcquillan.org/questions_for_anthropic.html). The author feels threatened, because he realizes that an AI could do his writing style much better than he does, given the absence of original thought. The author is a kind of free-rider: he persists in his position having read just-enough continental philosophy, and memorized the right incantations (buzzwords) to communicate the "aligned" political subtext. Academic left-wing jargon; you have to be against neoliberalism, "tech broligarchy", Palantir (the military industrial complex), technogenesis... Oh, and you have to shoehorn as many race politics subjects into your article on AI, even if they have virtually nothing to do with the topic (KKK, White Genocide, racial superiority, supremacy, eugenics). Points for creativity, I guess.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    I thought his reference to the AI being neutral on the KKK was relevant as it demonstrated the AI just doesn't really understand what it talks about.
    - Akranazon 1y ago

PeterStuer 1y ago

There is a serious discussion to be had on the impacts of AI, and it's effects on how to approach education, the role of academia in AI research etc. Sadly, this article, or lets be honest, rant, is not a contribution to that.

4ndrewl 1y ago
Because?

fallinditch 1y ago

That's a lot of words for one practical recommendation: University councils for discussing 'AI conviviality'. I think the author presents a one dimensional view of AI bad and fails to see the bigger picture, which is ironic considering all the fine words he uses. I agree that AI tools can potentially weaken some of our lower level cognitive functions, but on the flip side the AI tools also enable us to operate on higher levels of ability, planning, conceptualization and execution. This is undoubtedly a point of inflexion for Universities: they should be working out how they can achieve a new deal for students and society that is far more nuanced and constructive than mere 'resistance' against AI.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Animats 1y ago
That's really the only tangible recommendation in the article. The real problem for universities is this: much of what classical academia claims is important is not all that hard for a LLM. Writing "compare and contrast" student papers, research which consists of digging through existing texts and summarizing, and writing in a formal style are all things LLMs do. Probably better than most undergraduates. This shakes the philosophical foundations of academia. What are universities for now? Job training? Sorting the winners from the losers? Something else?
mariusor 1y ago
> but on the flip side the AI tools also enable us to operate on higher levels of ability, planning, conceptualization and execution. Are there any concrete examples of this? Did any researcher, engineer, artist, etc come forwards and say: "yes, this work you esteem so much, was created by me with the help of AI"? To me, your words sound more of wishful thinking than the situation as is currently. I'm willing to be set right though.

Imnimo 1y ago

>Generative AI's main impact on higher education has been to cause panic about students cheating, a panic that diverts attention from the already immiserated experience of marketised studenthood. It's also caused increasing alarm about staff cheating, via AI marking and feedback, which again diverts attention from their experience of relentless and ongoing precaritisation. >The hegemonic narrative calls for universities to embrace these tools as a way to revitalise pedagogy, and because students will need AI skills in the world of work. A major flaw with this story is that the tools don't actually work, or at least not as claimed. >AI summarisation doesn't summarise; it simulates a summary based on the learned parameters of its model. AI research tools don't research; they shove a lot of searched-up docs into the chatbot context in the hope that will trigger relevancy. For their part, so-called reasoning models ramp up inference costs while confabulating a chain of thought to cover up their glaring limitations. If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? It seems like that would be a problem that would solve itself - a student would attempt to use AI to cheat, it would fail to complete the assignment, and the student would get a bad grade.

lawlessone 1y ago
>If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? Cheating doesn't have to work for it to be cheating. If you get caught robbing a bank that doesn't un-rob the bank.
- Imnimo 1y ago
  But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    >But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue. We have police and prisons yet people still commit crimes.
    - 1y ago

trollbridge 1y ago

Teach, and require, students to handwrite (without a machine such as a smartphone or a PC nearby) whatever quizzes and homework and exams they need to do. Of course, this would mean professors and TAs would have to actually go back to hand-scoring work, instead of lazily leaving it up to their classroom management software. Beyond that written work, more of what universities examine of students should be students actually standing up and speaking about their work (without a machine assisting them).

karaterobot 1y ago

> The way this technology works means that generative AI applied to anything is a form of slopification, of turning things into slop. However, where AI is undoubtedly successful is as a shock doctrine, as a way to further precaritise workers and privatise services. You can't say both that AI produces worse results, and that it will be used to manipulate the job market: savvy companies would outcompete by not adopting AI, and hiring up the victims of AI layoffs. If either of his statements is true, the other is false. This whole article, man. I don't know where to start with it. It definitely reminds me of grad school. In a bad way. The university has been on a glide path toward irrelevance for quite a while—long before AI was a going concern—and the humanities and social sciences, in particular, have been skimming the treetops since at least when I was in school at the turn of the century. The role of the university is to teach and do research. AI can be a tremendous asset for both of those, and it's not going away, so deal with that reality.

dismalaf 1y ago

The role of university isn't to resist nor embrace. When I was in university, I did finance + economics + a bunch of other random stuff from CS to archaeology to philosophy. One subject that was interesting from a technology standpoint was statistics. I took university at a point when ML was a thing, but LLMs obviously weren't. R was a thing, Python was beginning to get popular in the domain, you potentially had all sorts of tech to help with stats. Introduction to stats, no technology was allowed. Every single problem was done by hand. Every single quiz and test, no calculators, no multiple choice, just problems to work through by hand. If you cheated on assignments, you'd obviously fail tests (which were >50% of the course). Problem solved. We had to learn without aids. Second stats course, everything was allowed. Did all my assignments with R. The point was simply learning. First theory, then how it's done on the real world. University absolutely should teach all the theories, concepts and history before AI. And then it should also teach how to use AI, since it's a thing in the real world. People just need to stop thinking about university as all about grades and check marks, and learn to learn.

waffletower 1y ago

We keep hearing the argument that AI datasets are built via "stealing"; it is as if the Fair use doctrine does not exist. Large copyright holders are the obvious beneficiaries of such denials, and perhaps the OP isn't just a mindless parrot on this point, but an active participant in intentional subterfuge. Copyright infringement can occur at the output, not at the input of AI models, people. For the author to be ethically consistent on this point, they would never use a university library ever again.

currymj 1y ago

this article contains some reasonable points about problems caused both by concrete advances in AI and by rhetoric about AI used to justify the decisions of the powerful. the focus is especially on AI-based end-user technology being sold to consumers and institutions. it seems to miss the point that some members of the university community may actually do research on AI, and may not feel inclined to ask for approval from the “People’s Council” to get permission to think about concepts in statistics, computer science, or decision theory.