When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.
It's not profitable and also very time consuming to suddenly have to grapple with a large percentage of your student body cheating / otherwise subverting the curriculum. The path of least resistance was adoption.
ya at least our government has the excuse of being run by fucking idiots. what's the university admin excuse?
I'm betting it's just that they are also idiots.
I think the AI push is part of the battle between the professors who recognize that AI is antagonistic to learning, against the university finance/hedge fund guys and trustees who want to reduce the power and cost of the faculty.
I don't think it's going to be much more than "LLMs were popular and we did what we needed to do to hype the university so we could get snappy resume items for our next job application"
This is like the time UVa's Board of Visitors tried to fire the uni president because she wasn't bringing in MOOCs fast enough for their liking because they had read one David Brooks column saying it was the future of education. Except now it's many Boards of Visitors and many David Brookses ☠️
Many David Brooks… nightmare fuel
Regrettably this is the moment we are in
I was going to say, this is not new. Now business people have a strong foothold in education, at federal and state levels on down, so they are "optimizing" everywhere.
I wonder if the rapid acceleration universities experienced during 2020/21 - online learning, Zoom fiestas, recorded lectures, Teams & MS365 rollouts - prepared the ground for AI incorporation/adoption? If you've adopted 6 new ways of working already this decade, why not round it off with GenAI?
imo the LLM is a product of and attempt to defend and preserve the same objectivist ontological world view that dominates classical ivory tower academia but most of the cool and useful stuff in academia doesn't happen in that part of it
The thing is that the sums splashed out on software are indeed eye-watering when seen in isolation, but when you put them next to labor costs, university finance people can't help but fall for anything that promises to save on labor--over and over again...
How much would they save on labor by cutting all the administrative positions that think this garbage is a great idea?
I mean it would certainly help, but the reason university administrators are incurable marks for this sort of thing is that education really is an expensive and labor intensive endeavour that our society really doesn't want to pay for...
1) Pretend to resist change 2) Adopt, cult-like, an untested tech they didn’t understand or know how to use 3) ????????? 4) PROFIT!
Because jumping into AI is way cheaper than thoroughgoing change. It's always about money with neo-liberal administrators.
The desire to have a college but not have teachers who do things like have opinions or want to get paid is an administrative dream. And that's what AI looked like, to them.
It’s a labor issue. They need to cut labor costs and are testing the waters with these shitty LLMs.
10 quid on it being because they thought they would be able to stop paying for TAs and exam corrections
Yeah it's entirely non-coincidental that most reform (cutting) plans are incorporating the embrace of AI as part of the 'new, innovative provision'.
If the Latin or Classics departments survive, maybe we could ask them the meaning of the phrase "cui bono?"
I see that AI is useless for tasks related to accurate accounting and company compliance. A machine's whole livelihood or professional/academic reputation does not depend on getting things right. AI behaves like a slack, cheating graduate in a job it's not remotely qualified for.
Also, you really should not be feeding confidential data into an LLM
Is the answer money
I’m guessing, with very little to back me up, that it’s all about the money. Less money being spent on actually education results in more money for administration. And lately it seems like it’s all about how much admin gets paid and not about how well students are learning
Essentially my thinking is that even if it turns out there is value for students and staff in embedding LLMs throughout the university curriculum, I do not believe that those pushing this kind of hasty and universal adoption have the knowledge (of AI or of education) to have made those calls.
Isn´t one factor for the haste that individuals within the universities are adopting these tools at great speed? Cfr. the colleague who mentioned that 25% of his first year class used an LLM in detectable way, and the increasing adoption of LLM´s for peer review, grant writing and more?
(2/2) ... and I'm sorry to say that anyone using LLMs for peer review should resign, get out of the game, and let someone take their job who's going to do it seriously.
Yes. I also happen to think anyone using an LLM to provide written feedback to students is, unbeknownst to them perhaps, risking their entire job by doing so. At some point sentiment turns here, particularly among students themselves, who will want human feedback even if they used an AI.
Absolutely. If you can't even be bothered to read your colleagues' work, what does that say about your attitude to the whole intellectual exercise?
Per posts of @dbellingradt.bsky.social and @ayates.bsky.social (that you might have seen earlier): we´re already way past that post, I´m afraid.
That´s also a fairly logical outcome actually, given how universities have a) increasingly favoured quantity over quality and b) have squeezed their labour force to the brink.
Vision of the glorious future: Students use AI to write papers to be graded by AI, while professors write papers using AI to be reviewed by AI. Hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions are then made by AI. Those of us who actually think, read, and write are deemed unproductive.
Unproductive except in the sense that they will remain legally accountable when the AI-tool screws up, of course. It naturally can´t be the sellers of the tools or the university leadership that takes the fall for those problems, can it.
I think the glory to the admins is that AI promises a future university with no professors.
And to further complicate matters, apparently so much money is sunk into AI it may well lead to a bubble: futurism.com/ai-agents-fa...
This is a very interesting study, thanks. By the summary (one click through) quality of the tools is not a reason for failure, but a) expecting too much of it and b) difficult internal tool development are. That first conclusion goes against big tech marketing efforts, the second supports them
AI is not paying off: moneyweek.com/investments/...
I always like the comparison with the dotcom bubble, which we are of course discussing via a technology and through types of platforms that absolutely failed back then, but that we now can´t operate without and support the largest companies in the world 😉
Absolutely failed, meaning in a financial overinvestment sense. The dotcom bubble was not about the technology not working, but about hype building up, and advertisement revenues going bonkers, for individual websites. Now the large companies make money through basically creating digital
gated communities and "'owning the market' in which people do transactions" like Amazon or being the middle man between people advertising (content creators) and people wanting to advertise (people wanting to sell a product) like Google/YouTube/Meta or a mix of both like Twitch(/also Amazon). 🤔
It would still be a first for universities to be following so quickly on what (they think) staff or students are doing -- not business as usual at all. Student use is unquestionably concerning and needs strategies (not acquiescence). (1/2)
"Individuals with lower AI literacy are more likely to embrace AI... This enthusiasm stems from a sense of “magic” associated with AI’s capabilities. Conversely, those with higher AI literacy, who understand the mechanics behind AI, tend to lose interest as the mystique fades."
It is not news that those who hold university purse strings often turn out to be extremely susceptible to salesmanship, particularly when it's framed in terms of missing out on what everyone else is doing. Will they learn from this? If universities survive, will governance change? I'm not hopeful.
Sadly, you may be right. In my former life my business was saved only when those who actually had ££ invested (ie me & others) seized back control of finance from those we believed had expertise but ultimately were w/o risk to themselves. Same kind of problem. This time, I don't see a solution.
Absolutely! "Buy this shiny new system that'll solve all your problems and be better than your competitors", five years later the system still hasn't been implemented or isn't working effectively, all the competitors also have rubbish systems and they're all £10 million down.
I'm astounded at how many people in senior management by into outsourcing activities, which look so homogenous across different Unis they can't possibly be of any value what so ever. The image on our websites and their design---are indistinguishable but cost a bomb.
The student models are all attractive, but not too attractive. I mean, really? This is what we are reduced to? (sorry buy into above)
Stockholm syndrome comes to mind
Stockholm syndrome? Given the characters — and their alacrity — "Heidegger Syndrome" is more apropos...
(and I say this as someone who has been interested in, and pushing for the use of GenAI in education before that even allowed)