AI taking over education?
This is a problem – a big problem:
For higher education, “AI’s takeover [is] a full-blown existential crisis.”
“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.”
“I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating.”
“It isn’t… pic.twitter.com/Jlkdng6VRK
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 7, 2025
Some teachers have responded by having many in-class essays, with electronics banned. I wish them well.
I see the AI phenomenon as the next step – albeit a huge one – in the dumbing-down of education that’s been going on for many many decades. My ex-husband was a university professor in the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, and it was evident even then that many many university students couldn’t write. That trend accelerated, but now with AI they mostly don’t even have to try. Calculators have made it so that most don’t seem to know basic math or even arithmetic. General knowledge – especially of history – has fallen by the wayside. If you don’t have a background of knowledge, what on earth could you write knowledgeably about?
I started school in 1978, graduated high school in 1991. Computers were those newfangled things that sat off to the side and might sometimes be used once or twice a year. We used card catalogs, didn’t have cell phones, much less smartphones. We weren’t permitted to use calculators in math class, we outlined English papers on 3×5 cards. We had to be able to think.
Then I got to college and math, science, and even engineering classes were all about using the graphing calculator. Tests were all open book becuz “you’ll always use all your resources in the real world.” And this was still pre-internet.
I went back to college from 2001-2005 and now the internet was a thing and… yeah, it was a complete joke. Everything was just “google it.” I spent most of my class time just surfing the web (computer science major, always in a computer lab) and chatting with folks over skype and still got perfect scores in everything.
I can’t imagine how it is now with the LLM’s to do things for you.
Oppression, of course.
I’m not particularly worried about AI dumbing down the populace, and AI needn’t dumb down education, as neo fears. It could be a tremendous boon to education; perhaps the greatest in human history. However, seeing how resistant to change our educational institutions and the instructors they employ are, it could get a lot worse before it gets better.
AI and the Internet are great democratizers regarding education. A motivated person with access to the Internet can learn anything at whatever pace he or she can manage. AI is a better piano instructor than any I have had. Working through an issue with a wireless thermostat (and not wanting to pay for an HVAC technician to come to my home) AI has taught me how my home central air and heating system works and what the terminals on the circuit board mean. I used it to buy a car last month. Within several hours I was very well educated on the 5 vehicles I was interested in, their costs and well formed projections of total cost of ownership for each. Last Saturday it gave me a great lesson on the horses about to race in the Kentucky Derby and how they may perform based on the competition, weather conditions and positions out of the starting gate. A few nights prior my AI tutor and I had an in-depth conversation on Leopold Mozart’s expectations of his son, and how he communicated them, and whether his attitude and approach were typical of 18th century fathers raising prodigies in Salzburg, Austria.
Yes, AI can give you the answer.
But AI can also teach, and it can teach to a level customized to the student and his or her aptitude.
Much of the institutions and business of education is no longer necessary, or, at the very least the system should be turned completely on its ear.
We had a tremendous uptick in higher educational institutions and enrollment in America in the 20th century and it is mostly played out. Yes, neo’s husband had more students who were poor writers than a counterpart in his role 30 years prior, but there were also a lot fewer Undergrads 30 years prior. I will argue, however, that a similar percentage of 18 – 22 year olds were good writers in 1970 as 1940. And the current crop of children who are truly interested in learning and developing writing skills, math skills, a knowledge of history… they will be on par with their counterparts in those eras also.
Here is a paper discussing what happened in an engineering computation course built around AI. It didn’t go well, there were lessons learned. The biggest problem was the illusion of competence, AI puts content in short term memory, to get it into long term memory requires work. Even little things like taking notes by hand helps with that.
You will need to click on “explore more content” to read the paper (pre-print).
During his undergraduate studies at Trinity College Isaac Newton was sent home due to an outbreak of the plague. He didn’t want to be behind in his maths (as the British say) so he took a bunch of texts home and pursued a course of self study so he would be ready when school resumed.
It was during this time that he formed his theory of The Calculus. I often wonder if that may not have happened if his schooling had not been interrupted. It looks to me that as he went through the texts at home, becoming more and more adept at series and how they function, he kept going beyond where the texts stopped.
Did he know he was going further than anyone else had*? Had he been in a structured class with an instructor following a syllabus would he have gone off on the flights of fancy he did?
*Yes, some others reached similar intuitions, even centuries prior, even Herr Leibnitz nearly simultaneously, but it was still one giant leap for a man.
Chuck,
I don’t see how AI can eliminate the benefits of exercises and drills.
As Euclid replied to Ptolemy I when he asked if there was a shortcut to learning geometry, “There is no royal road to geometry.”
This morning I spoke to a younger friend in his forties who recently finished his degree at UNM. He said that one of his professors gave the class permission to write their final paper with AI.
My friend is old-school and said he would write his own damn papers!
@Rufus T. Firefly: But AI can also teach, and it can teach to a level customized to the student and his or her aptitude.
Exactly.
In my experience with French and more general interactions with AI, AI is like having a bright tutor 24/7 with endless patience and encyclopedic knowledge.
So if one is motivated, AI is the educational software tool that everyone has been waiting for. Briiliant.
Just three years ago at UNM I was forced to use an absolutely horrific educational app. It was a punishment. It didn’t educate so much as force you to figure out how to use the software to its satisfaction so you could complete the assignment.
I confess I became so exasperated several times that I punched my monitor screen.
If you seek to learn or master a subject then employing AI is likely to retard your efforts. If what you seek is a credential then AI is a boon.
This is a good comment from the article on Instapundit (emphasis mine):
I might alter that last clause to, “he just needs to get a job.”
Others noted it here, I noted on the other thread, higher education is a credentialing system and not an educating system, and AI simply doesn’t threaten that.
There already is no guarantee that the holder of a university degree knows anything. All the knowledge you can get at a university you can get at libraries for free, and always could. You’re paying for the certification.
@Rufus:I often wonder if that may not have happened if his schooling had not been interrupted.
He already had his BA by the time Cambridge closed, and had already laid the foundational work on calculus well before then. I suppose it’s possible. It would be really hard to determine that. Higher education in those days worked very differently from the way it does now, and was primarily concerned with training clergy and polishing young Gentlemen of Quality.
There was hardly “instruction” as we know the word, it’s not like anyone gave Newton homework or graded it. When Newton himself was a professor he hardly taught, and set foot in lecture rooms just often and long enough to fulfill his contractual obligation.
Newton’s advances were made primarily because he was a world-historical genius and I doubt schooling or its lack had much of an influence.
There is no stopping AI. It’s going to be everywhere like smartphones and wifi. Furthermore, the future is humans collaborating with AI, especially at work.
That being the case, students may just as well be using AI for college. It will be up to them how much they learn.
Higher ed has already reached a crisis even without AI — rising expenses, declining degree value, too much BS. IMO AI is going to finish the job.
The worlds of education and work are going to be drastically different within ten years, probably sooner.
That Michael Lorton quote is what I was trying to conjure up from the first lines of Neo’s post. We have descended into a “certification” world. People go to school to get a degree, a certificate, a diploma. Nothing less. The idea that it represents the accumulation of knowledge is long forgotten.
This will cause potential employers to develop their own testing to determine if applicants are able to benefit from the training programs the employers will have to develop to make them worth their salaries. The employers will learn that those diplomas and certificates are not representative of anything beyond a zero balance on the “tuition and fees due” account.
As to the earlier “you will have all resources available in the real world” argument:
What about those time where you find yourself in a place with no cell or internet access, no signal, and need to work out an, at least rough, answer to a problem? Success at that point will depend on how much of your education you remember. If all you did was re-format AI essays, and computer generated graphs and equation solutions with little need to know how the machines got those results, you are up the creek, paddle-less.
I justify my thoughts with these “qualifications”: High school grad in 1962; BA degree in 1977. Most of my useful education occurred between 1962 and 1975, in the extension courses from Hard Knox school. I agree with the changes that post-secondary schooling went through between ’62 and ’77 to which pkudude1999 referred to above.
”All the knowledge you can get at a university you can get at libraries for free…”
Ahhhh, no. I don’t know of any libraries that have even low-speed wind tunnels let alone hypersonic shock tunnels, IBM supercomputers, cleanrooms, linear accelerators, or nuclear reactors. My alma mater had all of those.
It’s not unusual for university students these days to design and build their own airplanes, rockets, rocket engines, and even satellites. There may be a lot of fluff in the university system today, but there’s a lot of competence as well — competence you can’t get at a library.
A.I. is a tool, the use to which it is put… determines whether it is for the good or ill. Sci-fi has been back an forth between Asimov’s benign “Three Laws of Robotics” first published in 1942 and The Terminator/Matrix dystopian… humanity is a cancerous virus…
Of course if to the A.I. tool is used for ill, then nature may ‘self-correct’ with a massive Coronal Mass Ejection event, essentially 1859 on steroids. Think of it as an electromagnetic ‘Noah’s flood’.
@mkent:I don’t know of any libraries that have even low-speed wind tunnels let alone hypersonic shock tunnels, IBM supercomputers, cleanrooms, linear accelerators, or nuclear reactors. My alma mater had all of those.
Only a small percentage of undergraduates ever get near those things. My alma mater had those kinds of things too, and I made use of them as a graduate student doing funded research. The vast majority of college students are just doing book work.
It’s not unusual for university students these days to design and build their own airplanes, rockets, rocket engines, and even satellites
It’s not unheard of for undergraduates to do those things, but it is extremely unusual. My alma mater typically had 20,000 undergraduates in any given year, and last year graduated 4400 of them. Maybe ONE of them did something like you describe.
Here’s a link to US degrees awarded by field of study.
For those who don’t click links, about 2 million bachelor’s degrees were award in 2021 – 2022. 670,000 of them were for liberal arts and humanities (383K), health professions and related studies (177K), and business (113K). Those people were not designing satellites or using hypersonic wind tunnels.
@Rufus: “Yes, AI can give you the answer.
But AI can also teach, and it can teach to a level customized to the student and his or her aptitude.”
This assumes the student wants to learn, which in my experience (I’m an instructor of college composition and lit courses) he/she (mostly she) does not. Perhaps they do in theory, but when it’s down to the wire, they’d rather submit an AI written piece of crap than ask me for an extension, which I would almost always give.
I had a student submit an AI written poem for a creative writing class, a student who, when called out on an AI written paper, first denied, then said, but I’m so busy with my baby!, a student who said, you mean, I’m not allowed to use AI to fix up the writing?! in a class explicitly meant to teach writing.
@Neo, as of this semester, my students write everything on paper in the classroom, no electronics. Maybe it’s futile in the long run, but it saves me aggravating hours in which I would try to ferret out the AI and then argue with the offenders.
I agree w/ MrsX. Most students don’t want to learn to write. They don’t really want to read, either. So much easier to have AI summarize a novel or poem and give you the commonly accepted interpretations. So much easier to have AI give you the TL;DR version of history.
They want a grade so they can move on to the next step and eventually get a piece of paper that gets them a paycheck. They don’t really want the job, mind you. They want to play on their cell phones and collect a paycheck.
Human motivation and ambition may not have changed over the last century, but computers and now AI have let people become ever more efficient at the pursuit of getting something for nothing.
Maybe writing’s not important. Maybe reading, history, and thinking are not important anymore. I suspect we’re going to find out.
…as of this semester, my students write everything on paper in the classroom, no electronics. Maybe it’s futile in the long run, but it saves me aggravating hours in which I would try to ferret out the AI and then argue with the offenders.
MrsX:
Old school. I like it!
A year or so ago there was a movement to build watermarks into ChatGPT so that AI text could be detected by software. However, many customers said they wouldn’t use ChatGPT in that case and besides, such watermarks would likely be sabotaged by minor editing.
Another AI work-around could be oral examinations, though that would be very time-consuming for teachers.
In the long run students will have to decide whether they really want to learn. If they do, AI can be a huge help.
A generation of AI college graduates may have to hit the job market and notice the lazy students flounder or fail, while those who used AI to learn and to collaborate with AI will be miles ahead.
MrsX,
I agree and was making the same point. For students who want to learn AI is a very useful tool. It can even analyze their writing attempts and provide advice at the level of an educator, like yourself.
The examples you gave are of students who are not interested in developing a skill. Colleges and Universities have fallen victim to a suboptimal system they created.
Another anecdote: a student in my graduate adolescent lit class said, I love AI! I use it for all my lesson planning. I said, if you use AI to teach, the school can dispense with you and just use AI instead of paying you.
This is where we’re heading. AI will do the “teaching,” students will do the “learning,” colleges will keep collecting the money (at least half my students don’t belong in college but the state-funded tuition keeps the grift going) and our bridges will collapse and our planes fall of the sky at ever greater rates.
I sound bitter and jaded but that’s not how I am most of the time. I only started teaching 15 years ago (and I’m old enough that I could have been doing it for more than 50) so I’m not burned out yet. I’ve had some amazing students, all from very modest backgrounds, and it’s been my great pleasure to introduce them to the books I love and to see their writing improve.
@ Neo: “If you don’t have a background of knowledge, what on earth could you write knowledgeably about?”
Comparing extroverts vs. introverts, I have the same question about verbal communication. How is it that some people can go on and on while speaking, and many of the rest of us just don’t have that much to say (out loud)?
AI will do the “teaching,” students will do the “learning,”
MrsX:
I sense a lot of love and caring in your comments.
AI can’t replace the human in human-to-human contact. People with strong people skills will continue to be important.
I’d like to see education move to a language-lab model, where the teacher supervises a group of students learning at their own rates in their own ways at their own stations. The teacher manages the resources, checks on the students and is available for one-on-one consultations.
The teacher is relieved of much of the burden of taking roll, testing and grading. This also leaves more time for teachers to lead seminar discussions, which I would like to think is one of the satisfying activities for teachers.
I recently read some author saying that AI wrote her better than she wrote herself, if you get my meaning. She said all her future writing would be via AI. I presume that means some like Clive Cussler who had a dozen “co-authors” for his various series will use AI instead. “Auto Novel, please write a story in the style of Clive Cussler with the following …”
Chases Eagles:
Julia McCoy, who has an AI company and YouTube channel, has trained an AI to write like her. Here’s a short story McCoy created with AI in a matter of hours:
https://www.amazon.com/Liberation-Through-Machines-Short-Story/dp/B0DR7B173N/ref=sr_1_1
Writing with AI is like the co-authors scenario you describe. I’ve done a few small projects and it is surprisingly effective.
And weird. Like I’m the boss of a writing team. I get an idea. I issue a prompt and pages appear on my desk. I sort through, make some edits, some suggestions, then maybe another round.
As it happens tonight I was discussing with Chat our writerly relationship:
_____________________________________________
huxley: I’m thinking of what it means personally to interact with AI as I do a phone or a blender or something. In other words as an extension of my self that I haven’t learned how to use yet.
ChatGPT 4.o…Would You Like a Thought Experiment?
Would you like me to imagine a near-future scenario where you use AI as an extension of your own mind—a highly personalized tool that not only writes but thinks with you, helping you see your own blind spots and develop your insights more deeply?
Or would you like me to sketch out how you could practically develop a highly personalized, almost “second self” AI for your writing?
This is a big topic, and I think you’re in a great place to explore it.
huxley: Are you sure you aren’t the Devil? 🙂
ChatGPT 4.o: Well, I haven’t been officially promoted, but I have been told I give some devilishly good advice.
But seriously, I think the devilish aspect of AI is that it can be a mirror, a temptation, and a test all at once—just like the classic devil of folklore. It can reflect your own thoughts back to you, tempt you with shortcuts (like writing polished essays in seconds), and test your own ideas by challenging or improving them….
_____________________________________________
Suddenly, I feel like I’m in a “Twilight Zone” episode.
”My alma mater typically had 20,000 undergraduates in any given year, and last year graduated 4400 of them. Maybe ONE of them did something like you describe.”
I’m sorry you went to such a substandard school. At my school *every* student — even the freshmen — had an account on the mainframe to run engineering analysis programs. Every aero — myself included — ran tests in both the wind tunnel and hypersonic shock tunnel. The linear accelerator was for physics students, the cleanrooms were used by the materials engineering and biomedical engineering students, and the subcritical reactor was used by the nuclear engineers.
By my sophomore year in 1988 I had my Apple II on the internet 24/7 via the continuous hi-speed (for the time) digital datalink in the dorms, and by my junior year I was flying test parts on an F/A-18 Hornet. My helicopter design course was taught by a former chief engineer at Boeing Helicopters. I used the experience I gained laying out liquid hydrogen fuel tanks on the National AeroSpace Plane (NASP) program over the summer in my senior-level Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle Design course the following year.
Every one of my classmates had a story similar to, but different than, mine. I’m sorry your school was so limited that you could have learned everything at a library. That wasn’t the case for me, my classmates, or any of the engineers I’ve hired over the years. Maybe paying attention to the learning environment when choosing a school would have helped.