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This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
The best, and perhaps the only, way out of AI’s college takeover would be to embark on a redesign of classroom practice. But with so many other things to worry about, who has the time? In this way, professors face the same challenge as their students in the year ahead: A college education will be what they make of it too. At some point, everyone on... See more
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
“I would think to myself, What the hell am I doing, sitting watching this professor give the same lecture that he has given every year for the last 30 years? ” But he knew the answer even then: He was there to subsidize that professor’s research.
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
Again, example of misplaced motivation caused by system incentives. It also affects the professors.
For Lieber, AI’s allure seems more about the promise of achievement than efficiency. As with most students who are accepted to and graduate from an elite university, he and his classmates have been striving their whole life. As Lieber put it, if a course won’t have “a tangible impact on my ability to get a good job,” then “it’s not worth putting a... See more
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
misplaced motivation caused by societal incentives and pressures. To succeed or even survive, the bar is so high. When assignments/classes feel arbitrary, a means to an end, an obstacle to overcome or an obligatory box to check, there is every incentive to expedite the process of learning and none to engage with it.
As a college student, he told me, he has mostly inhabited a world with ChatGPT. For those in his position, the many moral questions that AI provokes—for example, whether it is exploitative, or anti-intellectual, or ecologically unsound—take a back seat to the simple truth of its utility. Lieber characterized the matter as pragmatic above all else:... See more
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
the corrupting power of convenience
The technology is no longer just a curiosity or a way to cheat; it is a habit, as ubiquitous on campus as eating processed foods or scrolling social media. In the coming fall semester, this new reality will be undeniable. Higher education has been changed forever in the span of a single undergraduate career.