California Colleges Test AI Partnerships. Critics Complain It's Risky and Wasteful (msn.com) 58
America's largest university system, with 460,000 students, is the 22-campus "Cal State" system, reports the New York Times. And it's recently teamed with Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia, hoping to embed chatbots in both teaching and learning to become what it says will be America's "first and largest AI-empowered" university" — and prepare students for "increasingly AI-driven" careers.
It's part of a trend of major universities inviting tech companies into "a much bigger role as education thought partners, AI instructors and curriculum providers," argues the New York Times, where "dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about AI, and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking..."
"Critics say Silicon Valley's effort to make AI chatbots integral to education amounts to a mass experiment on young people." As part of the effort, [Cal State] is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company's tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world's largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an AI committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students' career opportunities... Cal State is not alone. Last month, California Community Colleges, the nation's largest community college system, announced a collaboration with Google to supply the company's "cutting edge AI tools" and training to 2.1 million students and faculty. In July, Microsoft pledged $4 billion for teaching AI skills in schools, community colleges and to adult workers...
[A]s schools like Cal State work to usher in what they call an "AI-driven future," some researchers warn that universities risk ceding their independence to Silicon Valley. "Universities are not tech companies," Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, recently said in comments arguing against fast AI adoption in academia. "Our role is to foster critical thinking," the researchers said, "not to follow industry trends uncritically...."
Some faculty members have pushed back against the AI effort, as the university system faces steep budget cuts. The multimillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — which the university did not open to bidding from rivals like Google — was wasteful, they added. Faculty senates on several Cal State campuses passed resolutions this year criticizing the AI initiative, saying the university had failed to adequately address students using chatbots to cheat. Professors also said administrators' plans glossed over the risks of AI to students' critical thinking and ignored troubling industry labor practices and environmental costs.
Martha Kenney, a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, described the AI program as a Cal State marketing vehicle helping tech companies promote unproven chatbots as legitimate educational tools.
The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer "defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.
"Still, California's community college system landed AI chatbot services from Google for more than 2 million students and faculty — nearly four times the number of users Cal State is paying OpenAI for — for free."
It's part of a trend of major universities inviting tech companies into "a much bigger role as education thought partners, AI instructors and curriculum providers," argues the New York Times, where "dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about AI, and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking..."
"Critics say Silicon Valley's effort to make AI chatbots integral to education amounts to a mass experiment on young people." As part of the effort, [Cal State] is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company's tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world's largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an AI committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students' career opportunities... Cal State is not alone. Last month, California Community Colleges, the nation's largest community college system, announced a collaboration with Google to supply the company's "cutting edge AI tools" and training to 2.1 million students and faculty. In July, Microsoft pledged $4 billion for teaching AI skills in schools, community colleges and to adult workers...
[A]s schools like Cal State work to usher in what they call an "AI-driven future," some researchers warn that universities risk ceding their independence to Silicon Valley. "Universities are not tech companies," Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, recently said in comments arguing against fast AI adoption in academia. "Our role is to foster critical thinking," the researchers said, "not to follow industry trends uncritically...."
Some faculty members have pushed back against the AI effort, as the university system faces steep budget cuts. The multimillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — which the university did not open to bidding from rivals like Google — was wasteful, they added. Faculty senates on several Cal State campuses passed resolutions this year criticizing the AI initiative, saying the university had failed to adequately address students using chatbots to cheat. Professors also said administrators' plans glossed over the risks of AI to students' critical thinking and ignored troubling industry labor practices and environmental costs.
Martha Kenney, a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, described the AI program as a Cal State marketing vehicle helping tech companies promote unproven chatbots as legitimate educational tools.
The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer "defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.
"Still, California's community college system landed AI chatbot services from Google for more than 2 million students and faculty — nearly four times the number of users Cal State is paying OpenAI for — for free."
Sounds like the enshittification of education (Score:3)
Great. This will go well.
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Are you a fan of the All-Drug Olympics?
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Are you in favor of getting rid of cars and resorting to walking or running everywhere? I mean, the Olympics is for entertainment and showcasing natural human ability -- drugged up athletes don't meet that criteria. As I said before, if I need a bridge design, I am not going to deliberately handicap it. I am going to want the best possible design. Are humans are so dumb I have to repeat myself? Not a good sign. Maybe you should try to argue (with non-contrived examples or evidence) that the purely human des
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AI isn't at that level. This is by far the most common misconception about AI, and you have fallen for it as well.
AI cannot reliably solve novel problems, nor can it reliably produce high quality work like a design for a bridge. We still need humans to do that. And, the evidence is right before our eyes: bridge architects still have jobs. If AI could do this, all the bridge architects in the world would immediately be fired, since they cost so much more than AI.
I must belabor this point: yes, we have se
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First off, I believe I implied they should work with the AI .. while it can't fully design a bridge yet, it is not far from being able to do so. It will, once it can interface with tools like autocad and utilize templates etc.). It doesn't just do "pattern matching" it can reason also. You can ask it things like "what are the structural components of a suspension bridge?" or "what type of bridge is best across a 500 ft canyon that's 1000 feet deep?" It will suggest a type and tell you why that type is supe
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First off, I believe I implied they should work with the AI .. while it can't fully design a bridge yet, it is not far from being able to do so.
Hahaha, no. Try to explain that to the judge when you fact a long prison term for criminally negligent manslaughter. LLMs cannot do anything reliably at all.
Re:Sounds like the enshittification of education (Score:4, Interesting)
An AI can neither "reason" nor "think a problem through."
What it CAN do is process/parse inquiries, compare its components to existing known information, make associations, pattern match, etc.
To a human, the combination of those capabilities can APPEAR to be thinking and reasoning, but it's just a simulation (and a poor one at that).
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It appears we are going to have to keep learning this lesson, the hard way, for a while now.
These days I think many people can only learn from extreme failure, and some do not even manage that.
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How so? If anything AI would increase human abilities.
So far studies are showing that the more a student uses AI the less they actually learn, the less knowledge they actually retain. This then will cause problems in the future when those who do have actual knowledge leave the workplace and we're left with people who don't have a clue trying to do checks and balances and fixes on whatever AI spits out. Take your analogy of a bridge. You ask AI to design one. Without sufficient knowledge of civil engineering how are you to know whether the design AI comes up wi
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As for knowledge who cares if it's in your brain or encoded in silicon/electrons? If you can retrieve and use it at the opportune time that's good enough.
And then when you can't retrieve it and the AI is suddenly not available, who ya gonna call? There is no Ghostbusters for this situation.
It's already embarrassing that kids behind cash registers can't make change without a calculator. How bad will it be when almost all of the knowledge required to run society resides only in LLMs because everyone else has either forgotten it or never knew it?
I shouldn't actually care where you got it from (unless you stole it, in which case there are legal consequences), I should only care about the quality of the design itself.
That's only valid if you think that current LLMs are, morally speaking, either good or neutral. I don't believe that
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Re: AI already in schools (Score:3)
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Is that Haitian eating cats or not?
depends on who you ask.
nobody in Springfield thinks it's real. But Trump, JD & TheMostGullibleManOnTheInternet say it's true.
Pepsi generation advertising (Score:2)
Same story again, like how Microsoft was giving away for $10 office, development tools, etc. since the 1990s to get students AKA future corporate decision makers into the life long Microsoft purchasing habit.
The AI chatbot, search tools, note taking, whatever are more of the same - capturing interactions (surveillance capitalism, Facebook, etc) to package and sell at a later date.
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Strongest storm this year: Melissa underwent extreme rapid intensification over the weekend and continues to strengthen. The rare Category 5 has winds of 175 mph, with stronger gusts
Didn't Trump ban hurricanes?
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So, this dogfood factory... (Score:2)
So, this dogfood factory runs on dogfood.
\o/ (Score:2)
> The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer "defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.
I wonder why they offered their product at an unusually low price - perhaps they're eager to get access to your students? You could probably have had them pay you. <Points at ball on floor>.
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Maybe nothing. OpenAI could simply have identified them as easily impressable idiots. There are a lot of those in the education system.
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Why does Microsoft give away much of its programs for free to students? Of course they hope to get people to keep using their product after they graduate.
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Why does Microsoft give away much of its programs for free to students? Of course they hope to get people to keep using their product after they graduate.
Yes, a pusher often gives you the first taste for free. Unfortunately, we're not just talking about just individuals or even a generation getting addicted to AI - we're talking about the bulk of our society and, ultimately, perhaps all of civilization. Won't that be grand!
No choice (Score:2, Interesting)
Kids ARE using AI and they will continue to do so. Do what happened to math classes when calculators came out. Increase the breadth and amount of problems they are given to solve.
Re:No choice (Score:5, Insightful)
There are significant differences between calculators and AI. With calculators, one must know what they are doing but do not have to do the drudgery. With AI, one does not need to know what one is doing, and the entire purpose of education is to make one know what they are doing.
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That doesn't change the point of the OP. The student will use AI anyway. So it's up to you if you benefit from it as well and if you may even provide them applications of AI that are different from letting the AI do all the thinking. If you don't have a plan how to incorporate AI, the students will make their own plans. And they will probably take the easy route you're suggesting.
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Slide rules also teach logarithms and how to estimate orders of magnitude and a few other useful things. Removing them was really stupid.
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That's a dumb way to address that issue.
The correct way to address it is by designing your problems such that a calculator provides no advantage.
A calculator is useless if you don't know what to do with it.
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That would be the smart approach. But it requires work and it will bet too hard for many. Hence I bet this will not be done.
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Do what happened to math classes when calculators came out. Increase the breadth and amount of problems they are given to solve.
But the kids won't be solving them, they'll just feed the questions into an AI tool and learn nothing. That's the problem.
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Kids ARE using AI and they will continue to do so. Do what happened to math classes when calculators came out. Increase the breadth and amount of problems they are given to solve.
Or do what my schools did: ban them in the classroom and give plenty of pop quizzes. If you can't do the work on your own successfully in class with nothing but your pencil, paper, and brain, you fail. Period. Today's entitled mommies will scream, but fuck 'em.
My prediction (Score:2)
In 20 years, the movie Idiocracy will be fully realized.
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License AI to offer ultra-cheap micro-courses (Score:2)
If I want to learn (say), how to do Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, I need to scrounge around learning materials online, or signup for a Statistics degree.
Why not create a framework for the user's AI to contact the university AI, formulate a learning plan involving university course content and past assignments, and maybe 3rd party content. A course tailored to the user like a well fitting suit, readied in seconds and costing a few bucks.
To convert the micro-courses to a micro-credential, the user
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That sounds good, but "AI" cannot actually do that.
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It can do a passable simulacrum of that :-).
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I agree completely. AIs can do that already. There are even some prompts supposed to enhance the interaction. Something like this:
"You are an advanced so and so... You teach using the Socratic method".
Coupling AI to licensed course content chopped up for focussed instruction delivery will make it even more powerful. It should also reduce the chance of misinstruction or hallucination.
College AI be like .. (Score:2)
world's largest rollout?? (Score:2)
This is the wrong approach
Start small, very small. Measure results
If the results are good, expand a bit, measure results
If the results are good, expand a bit more, measure results
Repeat as long as measured results are good
DO NOT massively roll out immature tech
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The problem is that measuring educational effectiveness takes decades, sometimes half a century or longer. You have to guess. But betting on AI is definitely the wrong guess with the AI we have today.
Future of Education (Score:2)
Anybody else remember MOOCs, or how much money was spent on them?
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And a rather large number of other efforts to make education "cheaper"....
But, you don't do that. (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet you do the latter instead of the former. The higher education "industry" appears to be at least as fad-obsessed as any other.
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It's not "higher education" or the supposed "industry" therein. It's individuals at the top who are being pressured to:
1. Adjust to reductions in staffing costs due to the massive financial attack of the federal government (they hope GPT will be a force multiplier)
2. Find operating revenue from other sources
3. Adjust for the reduced quality of incoming college students
4. Spin all of the above into something that could potentially gain notoriety for the university and themselves