Higher Education and AI: Some Musings
To the surprise of exactly no one, AI tools are also rapidly changing the landscape of higher education. Whether for good or for worse is something that I am debating with myself every day—I vacillate between “Butlerian Jihad Now!” and a non-ironic “O brave new world, that has such algorithms in ’t.”
Starting with the good parts, I see students working on their own projects, pursuing some creative endeavors, and basically having a blast with creating things. I also see some of them becoming sleuths, trying to figure out how to lead a certain large language model astray, and taking an almost perverse pleasure in watching a model go “off-script.” I also see students translate slides and other lecture materials, get additional explanations, and work through some examples. All of that is great and exciting. The catch, however, is that, anecdotally speaking, this is what the strongest students do. They know how to wield these tools or at least show some restraint.
The bad parts are tales—told by students themselves—of getting tricked by AI, or, accounting for free will on the side of the student and a (purported) general lack of consciousness on the side of a large language model, tricking themselves into believing falsehoods. Not falsehoods in the sense of “The Earth Is Flat!!!1!” but smaller falsehood that sting more like “I understand this topic” or “I know this programming language.” I am reminded of Feynman’s famous quote:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
It is clear that, to some extent, we are fooling ourselves. We are fooling ourselves by performing cognitive offloading at unprecedented scales. We are fooling ourselves by accepting shallow summaries instead of the nuanced whole. And we are following ourselves by believing that we have to do it because everyone does it.
Like any technology worth its salt, AI offers a lot but does not come with a manual. It is up to us to rewrite the “rules of engagement” or create entirely new guardrails. We owe it to the students!
I remain optimistic about the gainful use of AI in higher education but it will take some substantial changes of our teaching practices. We cannot afford to ignore the writing on the wall for much longer.