AI is Upending Higher Education. Is That a Bad Thing?

Just two months after ChatGPT was launched in 2022, a survey found that 90 per cent of college students were already using it. I’d be shocked if that number wasn’t closer to 100 per cent by now.

Students aren’t just using artificial intelligence to write their essays. They’re using it to generate ideas, conduct research, and summarize their readings. In other words: they’re using it to think for them. Or, as New York Magazine recently put it: “everyone is cheating their way through college.”

University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of this. Some worry that if we ban tools like ChatGPT, we may leave students unprepared for a world where everyone is already using them. But others think that if we go all in on AI, we could end up with a generation capable of producing work – but not necessarily original thought.

I’m honestly not sure which camp I fall into, so I wanted to talk to two people with very different perspectives on this.

Conor Grennan is the Chief AI Architect at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he’s helping students and educators embrace AI. And Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at Stanford and Harvard, and the co-founder of the University of Austin. Lately, he’s been making the opposite argument: that if universities are to survive, they largely need to ban AI from the classroom. Whichever path we take, the consequences will be profound. Because this isn’t just about how we teach and how we learn – it’s about the future of how we think.

Mentioned:

AI’s great brain robbery – and how universities can fight back, by Niall Ferguson (The London Times)

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College, by James D. Walsh (New York Magazine)

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, by Nataliya Kos’myna (MIT Media Lab)

The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

How the Enlightenment Ends, by Henry A. Kissinger

Machines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Host direction by Athena Karkanis. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at the Globe & Mail.

Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.

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