How Ai Is Breaking College

You know when two friends are text flirting and you’re helping both of them craft their messages? Well, with both sides of the classroom now using AI, students and professors alike fear that higher education may be devolving into bot-to-bot interactions that teach students little more than how to use ChatGPT.

The freshmen from ChatGPT’s first year are about to be seniors. And while students adopted the tech fast and hard—nearly 90% of surveyed college kids were already using ChatGPT for homework help in January 2023, two months after launch, per OpenAI—educators held out for longer. But now, the percentage of college instructors who self-identify as frequent generative AI users has nearly doubled from 18% last year, the New York Times reported yesterday.

Everybody’s doin’ it, but many still believe it runs afoul of academic integrity, making the Wild West of AI in education wilder than ever:

• After years of complaints about students using AI, sites like Rate My Professors are now rife with complaints that professors are using AI to write course material and give grades, which many students call hypocritical and a waste of their tuition.
• One student transferred from Southern New Hampshire University after two professors used ChatGPT to “guide” their feedback on her assignments, which the school allowed, per the NYT.

On the other end, NYU students said their professor messed with their “learning styles” and asked for extensions when he worded his assignments so that AI models would fail to answer them, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece that went viral this week.

Looking ahead…experts agree that students likely need to learn how to use AI for post-grad, but weaving AI into education is a tightrope walk that everyone’s still figuring out. With how it’s currently being wielded by undergraduates, “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” an ethics professor told New York Magazine.—ML