University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of artificial intelligence’s rapid spread among students.skynesher/stock
Just two months after ChatGPT was launched in 2022, a survey found that 90 per cent of college students were already using it.
Students aren’t just using AI to write their essays. They’re using it to generate ideas, conduct research, and to summarize their readings. In other words: they’re using it to think for them.
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.
Machines Like Us: AI is upending higher education. Is that a bad thing?
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 historian, 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. Return to the basics. Learn without the aid of technology.
This interview has been edited and condensed from an episode of The Globe’s Machines Like Us podcast.
Taylor Owen What are you seeing that makes you so worried?
Niall Ferguson An immense amount of undergraduate assignments in universities all over North America are being completed by large-language models rather than by students. That’s bad because if you’re delegating reading, thinking and writing to ChatGPT, you’re not learning to do those things. My argument is not that we should burn the machines, but that we have to create a period of time in the student day, and I would say it should be about six or seven hours long, during which they don’t have access to AI. They’ll have to read and think and write for themselves.
You will have to abandon now decades-long practices of allowing students to do assignments in their own time with their laptops far from the supervision of professors. We’ve got to go back to written and oral exams under invigilation.
Taylor Owen Conor: Is there a way to use this within the classroom and within a pedagogical context? Can you just lay out a few of those best-case scenarios here?
Conor Grennan AI gives us the potential of using the best potential learning tool that has ever been created in history to really advance and augment critical thinking in the moment. That’s going to require a very serious rethinking of how we teach, and a very serious rethinking of the proxies for grading. This can take young people so far beyond where they are. And I’m talking in terms of skipping entire grades almost with the ability to, if used properly, to go home, work with AI, and then have the teacher say, okay, our expectations for you are much, much higher.
Taylor Owen Let’s talk about cheating in the AI era. Is it the act of writing or the entire process of creating that essay? What if a student uses AI to develop their outline or to do a brainstorm their structure or something like that? Is that cheating as well?
Niall Ferguson If you use it in the right way, it’s potentially the greatest teaching and learning tool ever. The wrong way to use it is the way it’s currently mostly being used, which is to cut corners so that you don’t have to read, think or write. If you don’t learn how to do those things, then you really aren’t educated.
I think what’s important here is the idea that you don’t say, here’s an assignment, and then they go off and get ChatGPT to do it. You actually say, here are a set of things that we’d like you to master. You’re gonna do a whole bunch of problems and AI is gonna see how quickly you learn. It’s gonna see you get along and it’s going to respond to the way you do in the first run of problem sets. And that will generate the next set accordingly.
Conor Grennan Incentives are everything. But what are the skills we actually really need? Do we still need to know how to write? Giant question mark. If we think about the calculator, all it did was democratize math. But it’s not like kids don’t have to learn math. My kids are going to kill me for saying this, but I think they need to write by hand or on an air-gapped computer, so they learn how to write. At the very root, kids need to learn what good writing looks like. Otherwise, I think that we are going come to a point of where everything is just AI slop.
Taylor Owen What happens when we detach writing from learning? Can we do that at all, or is writing core to how we, particularly in that phase of our brain development, learn to think?
Niall Ferguson What we really want to do in education is to have very, very fit brains. Brains that can very quickly absorb lots and lots of complex data, then they can think analytically, what does this signify? What’s the pattern here? And then they can communicate to other human beings by writing or by speaking what they think they’ve inferred from all of this. These are the things that make our brains fit.
So I think just get into the mental gym, people. I say to the students at the University of Austin, one day I’m going to come in here, I’m gonna tell you, you’ve got two days to read War and Peace, and you’re gonna be just shut in the library with the book. And then you’re going to come out and I’m going to ask you, what’s the meaning of this book? That’s the kind of thing that a smart person can do.
