In The Chronicle of Higher Education , Anastasia Berg suggests that “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane”:
How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.Amen, and amen.
Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.
As for discouraging AI among students,, I can imagine two Mad Magazine cartoons.
ReplyDeleteFirst, snob appeal: Never having used AI, a new graduate working among the team on Mad Men, a team where everybody can think. Such nicely educated peers.
Then slob appeal: If you always used AI, then after you graduate you will fit right in among peers wearing MAGA hats. Such nice conformity.