Whether online, on billboards, in business or the news, one topic is seemingly a constant headliner: AI. As one of the last refuges of human connection and genuine curiosity that transcends classrooms, institutes of higher education are among the most recent victims of AI infiltration and disruption. Young adults pursuing their degrees are increasingly relying on AI tools as a crutch, not as support; they are losing the ability to effectively and critically think for themselves.
AI in universities is a somewhat recent development – though, often the technology has been implemented under the surface and many students have been early adopters – as universities outright partner with AI companies to promote their tools. Not only is doing so counterproductive, but it represents a double-back on what these institutions’ founding principles overwhelmingly stand for: intellectual pursuit for the good of innovation and advancing the human condition. Even so, precedent and studies have shown that there is a vital need to test and study education technology before it is implemented, both for the technologies’ viability, but also to prevent situations like the one at present, where students are allowing AI to take away their cognition or creativity in favor of quick, uninvolved answers.
In fact, AI companies are disrupting institutions from within, aiming to turn students into nothing more than an addicted consumer base that loses its critical thinking ability by the day. For example, Anthropic, a prominent AI firm has begun to endorse “Claude campus ambassadors” to spread the message of the company while influencing other students towards its Claude AI tools to be utilized for school purposes. Anthropic is not alone; other companies are increasingly waving cash bonuses for students who meet marketing goals for the company, such as a set number of referrals to the online tools. These instances are clear conflicts of interest and – even if one might view them differently – are unfairly exploiting the brightest minds while discounting the true value of intellectual capital; the dollars subsume the brains.
A prime example of this development is the rise of the AI tool Cluely, which promises users that they will never have to rely on their own brains for anything. Cluely outright states that they want to allow their users to “cheat on everything.” An addon for virtual meetings, Cluely listens to conversations in real time and creates an indetectable popup only visible to the user that generates answers to human questions in real time. In this way, Cluely – among others in the AI space – is outright attacking human connection and purging intellectualism from the business recruiting world.
The rise of AI in education has not been one-sided, at least according to leaders like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who has preached that AI has the capacity to expunge disparities in many educational spaces and reach the students that real-life teachers cannot. Even in terms of academic integrity, an increasingly burdensome topic for the education sphere, AI companies fail to deliver. OpenAI developed a GPT detector but decided not to publicize the tool for educators. The reason is convoluted but among them is a succinct snapshot of these companies true motivations: an internal report found that attributing invisible watermarks on ChatGPT-generated text might push some users to competitors platforms.
While these developments may seem disconnected from reality, the facts could not spell out a clearer picture on campuses across the world. In the US, university library checkouts are down nearly 30% year over year, and academics from the UK of professors reported significantly decreased office hour attendance in the past five years. AI firms have taken their practices to center stage, as OpenAI opened ChatGPT Plus free of charge for all college students during the finals season, Google followed suit and made premium Gemini free for the same timeframe.
Such developments are, in many ways, a threat to university safety and stability. As students upload notes and documents at record pace into AI tools, which then store them in massive machine learning databases, there is an inherent risk of sharing sensitive student and university information. Without proper guidelines or supervision of AI use, millions of data points are being farmed without universities consent; without any ability to access such data, universities cannot ensure responsible use of these tools.
As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen notably declared in 2011 that “software is eating the world,” the same is true for the field of higher education at present. If institutions and universities do not proactively manage student AI use and promote genuine intellectual involvement, the field as a whole becomes a dilapidated platform that delegitimizes learning in the 21st century.
