Tyler Austin Harper writes:

Since the release of ChatGPT, in 2022, colleges and universities have been engaged in an experiment to discover whether artificially intelligent chatbots and the liberal-arts tradition can coexist. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, by now the answer is clear: They cannot. AI-enabled cheating is pretty much everywhere. As a May New York magazine essay put it, “students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education.”

This rampant, unauthorized AI use degrades the educational experience of individual students who overly rely on the technology and those who wish to avoid using it. When students ask ChatGPT to write papers, complete problem sets, or formulate discussion queries, they rob themselves of the opportunity to learn how to think, study, and answer complex questions. These students also undermine their non-AI-using peers. Recently, a professor friend of mine told me that several students had confessed to him that they felt their classmates’ constant AI use was ruining their own college years.

Widespread AI use also subverts the institutional goals of colleges and universities. Large language models routinely fabricate information, and even when they do create factually accurate work, they frequently depend on intellectual-property theft. So when an educational institution as a whole produces large amounts of AI-generated scholarship, it fails to create new ideas and add to the storehouse of human wisdom. AI also takes a prodigious ecological toll and relies on labor exploitation, which is impossible to square with many colleges’ and universities’ professed commitment to protecting the environment and fighting economic inequality.

Some schools have nonetheless responded to the AI crisis by waving the white flag: The Ohio State University recently pledged that students in every major will learn to use AI so they can become “bilingual” in the tech; the California State University system, which has nearly half a million students, said it aims to be “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-empowered university system.”

Teaching students how to use AI tools in fields where they are genuinely necessary is one thing. But infusing the college experience with the technology is deeply misguided. Even schools that have not bent the knee by “integrating” AI into campus life are mostly failing to come up with workable answers to the various problems presented by AI. At too many colleges, leaders have been reluctant to impose strict rules or harsh penalties for chatbot use, passing the buck to professors to come up with their own policies. [Continue reading…]