📰 AI News: “AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself”
📝 TL;DR A new long form essay argues that generative AI is quietly hollowing out universities from the inside. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to teach and grade, and the result is a degree with less and less real thinking behind it. 🧠 Overview A professor at a U.S. public university has written a blistering critique of how AI is being integrated into higher education. He argues that universities are turning into “Chatversities” where students outsource thinking to AI, administrators partner with AI vendors, and everyone pretends real learning is still happening. The piece frames this not as a tech problem, but as a deeper crisis of incentives, corporatization, and what education is actually for. 📜 The Announcement The article describes what is already happening on the ground. Large university systems are signing campus wide deals for “edu” versions of chatbots, while faculty are encouraged to redesign courses around AI tools. At the same time, many students are using the same tools to generate essays, complete assignments, and even cheat on tests. The author argues that this “cheating AI” ecosystem is turning higher education into a high priced credential machine with very little genuine cognitive development happening underneath. ⚙️ How It Works → Students offload the hard thinking They paste prompts into AI, get passable essays or solutions, lightly edit, and submit. Over time they practice “prompting” instead of analysis, memory, or writing. → Universities join the AI arms raceInstitutions partner with AI companies for teaching tools, then also buy AI detectors to police cheating, creating a loop where tech firms profit at every step. → Faculty are quietly pushed to automate their own work Overloaded teachers are nudged to use AI to write lectures, slides, assignments, and feedback. That saves time but also erodes craft, care, and the teacher’s own voice.