6 ms·

AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

79 points by speckx 1y ago

reify 1y ago
It seems that the UK government is all in with ai in the class room. here is a UK .gov study of 21 schools, colleges, academies, universites and technical colleges who have adopted ai. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and-further-education-findings-from-early-adopters/the-biggest-risk-is-doing-nothing-insights-from-early-adopters-of-artificial-intelligence-in-schools-and-further-education-colleges https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and... The majority of education providers have yet to adopt AI. Further research with those yet to adopt AI, and/or who are not considering using it, would help us understand better the barriers to more widespread use of AI across different types and phases of education. For example, the assistant headteacher of one school said the top categories their teachers used in their AI tool were ‘help me write’, ‘slideshow’, ‘model a text’, ‘adapt a text’, ‘lesson plan’ and ‘resource generation’.
- blibble 1y ago
  I am thankful I was awarded my degrees before this crap ever existed > As the AI champion told us: “If you put junk in, you’ll get junk out.” and if you put gold in, you'll still get junk out
charlie-83 1y ago
The situation in higher education at the moment does seem pretty dire. However, I do have some hope that a new system could emerge from this which would be better. The purpose of higher education should be to learn things that will be useful to you (most likely in a career). However, the current purpose is to gain a piece of paper which will mean your job application doesn't get immediately thrown out. People being willing to spend so much time and money on university only to deliberately avoid learning or thinking by using AI to cheat on everything suggests that the system itself is broken. These students don't actually want to be in university but feel they have to in order to have a chance at success in the current job market. We are in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone is getting degrees just to be a more appealling applicant than the next person. You might have authored a very impressive opensource library but still not get the junior software dev job because HR never gave your CV to the hiring manager since you don't have a STEM degree and 50 other applicants did. However, I don't really know how university's will evolve from this or what this new system will be. It seems hard to motivate a bunch of 18 year olds to actually want to learn stuff without dangling a piece of paper and exams at the end. Maybe that's just a symptom of all of the levels of education that come before university also dangling paper and exams. There were certainly parts of my degree I would have, at the time, liked to have skipped with AI but now (older and wiser) I'm very glad I couldn't.
- flr03 1y ago
  This is simplistic and I believe wrong. People still go to university because they are passionate and want to learn things, exchange with peers, grow as a person. Education is not just "buying" a certification to open doors. This part I'm happy to get rid off.
  - charlie-83 1y ago
    I completely agree with you. While I got a piece of paper at the end, I also learned lots of really useful things and met a lot of interesting people. There are still lots of passionate students that want to learn as much as they can. But those students aren't going to be using AI to skip all the learning. The article and just about everyone in higher education right now are saying that a large number of students are doing that. So, there must be a large number of students who are primarily motivated by piece of paper (and the job opportunity it provides). That doesn't mean that they must be completely disinterested in their subject. They might have some lectures they really like and where they do the coursework properly. However, the epidemic of AI cheating speaks to the inefficiency created by the need for the piece of paper. If someone is essentially skipping 80% of the learning with AI then the job market requiring you to have a piece of paper is causing someone to waste 80% of their time and money. They would be better served by a short course teaching them only that 20% of skills they actually want. The social side of things isn't something I was really addressing in this context. To me, that's a bonus of university. Given the cost, it doesn't seem worth going to university primarily for a social experience (unless you live somewhere where it's free). I also really hope that AI isn't affecting these social aspects.
nzach 1y ago
> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. That doesn't feel right. I thought that several groups were against the popularization of writing through the times. Wasn't Socrates against writing because it would degrade your memory? Wasn't the church against the printing press because it allowed people to read in silence? Sorry for the off-topic.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  I'm not that well read on Hershock but I don't think this is a very good application of his tool-vs-tech framework. His view is that tools are localized and specific to a purpose, where technologies are social & institutional. So writing down a shopping list for yourself, the pen is a tool; using it to write a letter to a friend, the pen is one part of the letter-writing technology along with the infrastructure to deliver the letter, the cultural expectation that this is a thing you can even do, widespread literacy, etc. Again I think this is a pretty narrow theory that Hershock gets some good mileage out of for what he's looking at but isn't a great fit for understanding this issue. The extremely naive "tools are technologies we have already accepted the changes from" has about as much explanatory power here. But also again I'm not a philosopher or a big Hershock proponent so maybe I've misread him.
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    It's essentially Dr Ted's theory of small scale vs large scale technology
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  That is perfectly on topic and you are identifying correctly flaw in the argument Technology is neutral it’s always been neutral it will be neutral I quote Bertrand Russell on this almost every day: “As long as war exists all new technology will be utilized for war” You can abstract this away from “war” into anything that’s undesirable in society. What people are dealing with now is the newest transformational technology that they can watch how utilizing it inside the current structural and economic regime of the world accelerates the already embedded destructive nature of structure and economic system we built. I’m simply waiting for people to finally realize that, instead of blaming it on “AI” just like they’ve always blamed it on social media, TV, radio, electricity etc… it’s like literally the oldest trope with respect to technology and humanity some people will always blame the technology when in fact it’s not…it’s the society that’s a problem Society needs to look inward at how it victimizes itself through structural corrosion, not look for some outside person who is victimizing them
MichaelRazum 1y ago
There seems to be two likely outcomes. First the value of education drops, since studying becomes much easier. Second, we will have few young genius level people, who were able to learn very quickly with help of AI.
waffletower 1y ago
This is such a naive, simplistic, distrusting and ultimately monastic perspective. An assumption here is that university students are uncritical and incapable of learning while utilizing AI as an instrument of mind. I think a much more prescient assessment would be that presence of AI demands a transformation and evolution of university curricula and assessment - and the author details early attempts at this -- but declares them failures and uncritical acquiescence. AI is literally built from staggeringly large subsets of human knowledge -- university cultures that refuse to critically participate and evolve with this development, and react by attempting to deny student access, do not deserve the title "university" -- perhaps "college", or the more fitting "monastery", would suffice. The obsession with "cheating", the fallacy that every individual needs to be assessed hermetically, has denied the reality (for centuries) that we are a collective and, now more than ever, embody a rich mass mind. Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Even conceding that you, the person reading this comment, will only use AI the right way. With diligence and curiosity. It takes a significant amount of denial not to understand that the majority of people see AI a shortcut to do their job with the least possible amount of effort, or as a way to cheat. These are the people you will be interacting with for the coming decades of your life.
  - waffletower 1y ago
    If a student is given a task that a machine can do, and there is some intrinsic value for the student to perform this task manually and hermetically, this value ought to be explained to the student, and they can decide for themselves how to confront the challenge. I think LLMs pose an excellent challenge to educators -- if they are lazily asking for regurgitation from students they are likely to receive machine-aided regurgitation in 2025.
- ragingregard 1y ago
  > This is such a naive, simplistic, distrusting and ultimately monastic perspective This is such a disingenuous take on the article, there's nothing naive or simplistic about it, it's literally full of critical thought linking to more critical thought of other academic observers to what's happening at the educational level. The context in your reply implies you read at most the first 10% of the article. The article flagged numerous issues with LLM application in the educational setting including 1) critical thinking skills, brain connectivity and memory recall are falling as usage rises, students are turning into operators and are not getting the cognitive development they would thru self-learning 2) Employment pressures have turned universities into credentialing institutions vs learning institutions, LLMs have accelerated these pressures significantly 3) Cognitive development is being sacrificed with long term implications on students 4) School admins are pushing LLM programs without consultation, as experiments instead of in partnership with faculty. Private industry style disruption. The article does not oppose LLM as learning assistant, it does oppose it as the central tool to cognitive development, which is the opposite of what it accomplishes. The author argues universities should be primarily for cognitive development. > Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well. Might as well work at OpenAI marketing with bold statements like that.
chistev 1y ago
Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their references and took the AI's output as gospel. https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-making-us-dumber https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
- disqard 1y ago
  From a certain perspective, these students are optimizing their Time, which is not an unwise strategy. If you've saved 3 hours by using an LLM, would it make sense to spend 1 hour checking those references by hand? Of course, they're also cheating themselves out of an education, but few students have that Big Picture at their age.
  - chistev 1y ago
    You make good points.
ActorNightly 1y ago
My experience is with US universities only, but Im glad that they are becoming irrelevant. They are a scam through and through.
enceladus06 1y ago
Just use closed-notes pen and paper exams and allow AI use entirely for everything else. Also women's and gender studies degrees were already a scam unless you have a trust fund.
- defgeneric 1y ago
  I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors would offload part of the grading task to TAs and grad students. It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.
jeremysalwen 1y ago
Did anyone else think there were several transitions that seemed like pure GPTisms? > This isn’t innovation—it’s institutional auto-cannibalism. The new mission statement? Optimization.
- oh_fiddlesticks 1y ago
  Yep
adi_kurian 1y ago
Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future. Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify student voice and baseline ability. And when resources permit have oral exams and presentations as a means of assessment. We did this for decades when tuition was a fraction of today's cost. Any argument that we can't return to basics is bollocks. If you're trying to hawk education for $$$$$$, probably need to offer some actual human instruction, not Zoom and Discord sessions that anyone could run from their bedroom. If they can't, then the rot and capture really is as bad as this makes out, and to update Will Hunting: the kids might as well save $150k and get their learning for $20/month on ChatGPT.
- Pet_Ant 1y ago
  My parents had oral exams in university. I feel like that actually is a better format that does not rewarding cramming, but is interactive and over quicker. It means that there is a dynamic that actually allows for grading problem solving over regurgitation.
  - ravenstine 1y ago
    I agree, though I shudder to imagine how cringey the switchover would be. A significant number of students already had poor diction and linguistic skills when I was in college, and recent evidence shows this situation has likely become worse.
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    Anyone with oral exams was privileged.
    - Pet_Ant 1y ago
      > Anyone with oral exams was privileged. No, they really weren't. These were state school's in 1970's eastern Europe. No tuition, and neither parent was from a privileged background.
nacozarina 1y ago
for every new technology mankind has developed, the safety rules are written in blood, based solely on the series of calamities and inhumanities that followed the invention’s wake it’s not gonna be any different this time
firmretention 1y ago
Pretty certain this article was written with an LLM. I can't tell you how many LLM-critical articles I've seen that are themselves written by an LLM. It's some weird kind of incestuous irony that you'd think the author of such a piece would try to avoid.

79 points by speckx 1y ago

It seems that the UK government is all in with ai in the class room. here is a UK .gov study of 21 schools, colleges, academies, universites and technical colleges who have adopted ai. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and-further-education-findings-from-early-adopters/the-biggest-risk-is-doing-nothing-insights-from-early-adopters-of-artificial-intelligence-in-schools-and-further-education-colleges https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and... The majority of education providers have yet to adopt AI. Further research with those yet to adopt AI, and/or who are not considering using it, would help us understand better the barriers to more widespread use of AI across different types and phases of education. For example, the assistant headteacher of one school said the top categories their teachers used in their AI tool were ‘help me write’, ‘slideshow’, ‘model a text’, ‘adapt a text’, ‘lesson plan’ and ‘resource generation’.

blibble 1y ago
I am thankful I was awarded my degrees before this crap ever existed > As the AI champion told us: “If you put junk in, you’ll get junk out.” and if you put gold in, you'll still get junk out

charlie-83 1y ago

The situation in higher education at the moment does seem pretty dire. However, I do have some hope that a new system could emerge from this which would be better. The purpose of higher education should be to learn things that will be useful to you (most likely in a career). However, the current purpose is to gain a piece of paper which will mean your job application doesn't get immediately thrown out. People being willing to spend so much time and money on university only to deliberately avoid learning or thinking by using AI to cheat on everything suggests that the system itself is broken. These students don't actually want to be in university but feel they have to in order to have a chance at success in the current job market. We are in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone is getting degrees just to be a more appealling applicant than the next person. You might have authored a very impressive opensource library but still not get the junior software dev job because HR never gave your CV to the hiring manager since you don't have a STEM degree and 50 other applicants did. However, I don't really know how university's will evolve from this or what this new system will be. It seems hard to motivate a bunch of 18 year olds to actually want to learn stuff without dangling a piece of paper and exams at the end. Maybe that's just a symptom of all of the levels of education that come before university also dangling paper and exams. There were certainly parts of my degree I would have, at the time, liked to have skipped with AI but now (older and wiser) I'm very glad I couldn't.

flr03 1y ago
This is simplistic and I believe wrong. People still go to university because they are passionate and want to learn things, exchange with peers, grow as a person. Education is not just "buying" a certification to open doors. This part I'm happy to get rid off.
- charlie-83 1y ago
  I completely agree with you. While I got a piece of paper at the end, I also learned lots of really useful things and met a lot of interesting people. There are still lots of passionate students that want to learn as much as they can. But those students aren't going to be using AI to skip all the learning. The article and just about everyone in higher education right now are saying that a large number of students are doing that. So, there must be a large number of students who are primarily motivated by piece of paper (and the job opportunity it provides). That doesn't mean that they must be completely disinterested in their subject. They might have some lectures they really like and where they do the coursework properly. However, the epidemic of AI cheating speaks to the inefficiency created by the need for the piece of paper. If someone is essentially skipping 80% of the learning with AI then the job market requiring you to have a piece of paper is causing someone to waste 80% of their time and money. They would be better served by a short course teaching them only that 20% of skills they actually want. The social side of things isn't something I was really addressing in this context. To me, that's a bonus of university. Given the cost, it doesn't seem worth going to university primarily for a social experience (unless you live somewhere where it's free). I also really hope that AI isn't affecting these social aspects.

nzach 1y ago

> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. That doesn't feel right. I thought that several groups were against the popularization of writing through the times. Wasn't Socrates against writing because it would degrade your memory? Wasn't the church against the printing press because it allowed people to read in silence? Sorry for the off-topic.

giraffe_lady 1y ago
I'm not that well read on Hershock but I don't think this is a very good application of his tool-vs-tech framework. His view is that tools are localized and specific to a purpose, where technologies are social & institutional. So writing down a shopping list for yourself, the pen is a tool; using it to write a letter to a friend, the pen is one part of the letter-writing technology along with the infrastructure to deliver the letter, the cultural expectation that this is a thing you can even do, widespread literacy, etc. Again I think this is a pretty narrow theory that Hershock gets some good mileage out of for what he's looking at but isn't a great fit for understanding this issue. The extremely naive "tools are technologies we have already accepted the changes from" has about as much explanatory power here. But also again I'm not a philosopher or a big Hershock proponent so maybe I've misread him.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  It's essentially Dr Ted's theory of small scale vs large scale technology
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
That is perfectly on topic and you are identifying correctly flaw in the argument Technology is neutral it’s always been neutral it will be neutral I quote Bertrand Russell on this almost every day: “As long as war exists all new technology will be utilized for war” You can abstract this away from “war” into anything that’s undesirable in society. What people are dealing with now is the newest transformational technology that they can watch how utilizing it inside the current structural and economic regime of the world accelerates the already embedded destructive nature of structure and economic system we built. I’m simply waiting for people to finally realize that, instead of blaming it on “AI” just like they’ve always blamed it on social media, TV, radio, electricity etc… it’s like literally the oldest trope with respect to technology and humanity some people will always blame the technology when in fact it’s not…it’s the society that’s a problem Society needs to look inward at how it victimizes itself through structural corrosion, not look for some outside person who is victimizing them

MichaelRazum 1y ago

There seems to be two likely outcomes. First the value of education drops, since studying becomes much easier. Second, we will have few young genius level people, who were able to learn very quickly with help of AI.

waffletower 1y ago

This is such a naive, simplistic, distrusting and ultimately monastic perspective. An assumption here is that university students are uncritical and incapable of learning while utilizing AI as an instrument of mind. I think a much more prescient assessment would be that presence of AI demands a transformation and evolution of university curricula and assessment - and the author details early attempts at this -- but declares them failures and uncritical acquiescence. AI is literally built from staggeringly large subsets of human knowledge -- university cultures that refuse to critically participate and evolve with this development, and react by attempting to deny student access, do not deserve the title "university" -- perhaps "college", or the more fitting "monastery", would suffice. The obsession with "cheating", the fallacy that every individual needs to be assessed hermetically, has denied the reality (for centuries) that we are a collective and, now more than ever, embody a rich mass mind. Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Even conceding that you, the person reading this comment, will only use AI the right way. With diligence and curiosity. It takes a significant amount of denial not to understand that the majority of people see AI a shortcut to do their job with the least possible amount of effort, or as a way to cheat. These are the people you will be interacting with for the coming decades of your life.
- waffletower 1y ago
  If a student is given a task that a machine can do, and there is some intrinsic value for the student to perform this task manually and hermetically, this value ought to be explained to the student, and they can decide for themselves how to confront the challenge. I think LLMs pose an excellent challenge to educators -- if they are lazily asking for regurgitation from students they are likely to receive machine-aided regurgitation in 2025.
ragingregard 1y ago
> This is such a naive, simplistic, distrusting and ultimately monastic perspective This is such a disingenuous take on the article, there's nothing naive or simplistic about it, it's literally full of critical thought linking to more critical thought of other academic observers to what's happening at the educational level. The context in your reply implies you read at most the first 10% of the article. The article flagged numerous issues with LLM application in the educational setting including 1) critical thinking skills, brain connectivity and memory recall are falling as usage rises, students are turning into operators and are not getting the cognitive development they would thru self-learning 2) Employment pressures have turned universities into credentialing institutions vs learning institutions, LLMs have accelerated these pressures significantly 3) Cognitive development is being sacrificed with long term implications on students 4) School admins are pushing LLM programs without consultation, as experiments instead of in partnership with faculty. Private industry style disruption. The article does not oppose LLM as learning assistant, it does oppose it as the central tool to cognitive development, which is the opposite of what it accomplishes. The author argues universities should be primarily for cognitive development. > Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well. Might as well work at OpenAI marketing with bold statements like that.

chistev 1y ago

Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their references and took the AI's output as gospel. https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-making-us-dumber https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...

disqard 1y ago
From a certain perspective, these students are optimizing their Time, which is not an unwise strategy. If you've saved 3 hours by using an LLM, would it make sense to spend 1 hour checking those references by hand? Of course, they're also cheating themselves out of an education, but few students have that Big Picture at their age.
- chistev 1y ago
  You make good points.

ActorNightly 1y ago

My experience is with US universities only, but Im glad that they are becoming irrelevant. They are a scam through and through.

enceladus06 1y ago

Just use closed-notes pen and paper exams and allow AI use entirely for everything else. Also women's and gender studies degrees were already a scam unless you have a trust fund.

defgeneric 1y ago
I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors would offload part of the grading task to TAs and grad students. It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.

jeremysalwen 1y ago

Did anyone else think there were several transitions that seemed like pure GPTisms? > This isn’t innovation—it’s institutional auto-cannibalism. The new mission statement? Optimization.

oh_fiddlesticks 1y ago
Yep

adi_kurian 1y ago

Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future. Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify student voice and baseline ability. And when resources permit have oral exams and presentations as a means of assessment. We did this for decades when tuition was a fraction of today's cost. Any argument that we can't return to basics is bollocks. If you're trying to hawk education for $$$$$$, probably need to offer some actual human instruction, not Zoom and Discord sessions that anyone could run from their bedroom. If they can't, then the rot and capture really is as bad as this makes out, and to update Will Hunting: the kids might as well save $150k and get their learning for $20/month on ChatGPT.

Pet_Ant 1y ago
My parents had oral exams in university. I feel like that actually is a better format that does not rewarding cramming, but is interactive and over quicker. It means that there is a dynamic that actually allows for grading problem solving over regurgitation.
- ravenstine 1y ago
  I agree, though I shudder to imagine how cringey the switchover would be. A significant number of students already had poor diction and linguistic skills when I was in college, and recent evidence shows this situation has likely become worse.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  Anyone with oral exams was privileged.
  - Pet_Ant 1y ago
    > Anyone with oral exams was privileged. No, they really weren't. These were state school's in 1970's eastern Europe. No tuition, and neither parent was from a privileged background.

nacozarina 1y ago

for every new technology mankind has developed, the safety rules are written in blood, based solely on the series of calamities and inhumanities that followed the invention’s wake it’s not gonna be any different this time

firmretention 1y ago

Pretty certain this article was written with an LLM. I can't tell you how many LLM-critical articles I've seen that are themselves written by an LLM. It's some weird kind of incestuous irony that you'd think the author of such a piece would try to avoid.