In a recent press release, the CSU system announced a “landmark initiative to become (the) nation’s first and largest AI-empowered university system,” unveiling a public-private partnership with Silicon Valley to harness AI in ways that “could surpass any existing model in both scale and impact."
“The CSU’s unprecedented adoption of AI technologies will make trainings, learning and teaching tools — including ChatGPT — available across all 23 CSU universities, ensuring that the system’s more than 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff have equitable access to cutting-edge tools that will prepare them to meet the rapidly changing education and workforce needs of California,” the press release stated.
When I saw the announcement in a university-wide email, I read it to my 13-year-old granddaughter. Her response? “If we have ChatGPT, why do we need a university?” That’s a question worth considering.
The clear agenda of the university system in this endeavor is to shape its campuses into a workforce incubator for California’s powerful high-tech industry.
Everyone wants California students to receive the tools they need to live interesting, fulfilling and productive lives. However, the labor-force creation goals embedded in the CSU’s AI initiative are troubling. Something as complex and potentially disruptive as AI demands knowledgeable, reflective and purposeful application.
AI is good at some things. I’ve used it to plow through hundreds of pages of transcript data to identify patterns in classroom talk. It saved me some time because it’s good at processing tedious amounts of material.
But it’s not good at telling the truth. To test this, I recently prompted ChatGPT to write a piece about quilling, an art craft. What I got was a failed assignment — a vague and factually disputable outline with a bogus bibliography. The fictional list of references was a failure, not just a mistake. That should trouble anyone who wants to unleash AI on 460,000 students without first providing them substantial training in academic integrity and instilling a commitment to verify the accuracy of AI’s work.
The increasingly common notion that AI advances student thinking by brainstorming topics, writing summaries of readings and producing essays is nonsense. Current research on learning confirms a need for students to work at engaging with complex material, performing varied mental tasks to achieve expertise — and that’s not easy. Offering crutches like ChatGPT blocks students’ development rather than enhancing it.
Cynthia Desrochers, the former director of the CSU’s university-wide Institute for Teaching and Learning, is not opposed to students learning about AI. As she told me in an email, however, students “need to show their ability to think critically first before they let AI think (which it really doesn’t do, and that’s the issue) for them.”
Let’s get the order right. First, we need to be thinkers, not automatons. When learning to solve complex problems, we make an attempt, reflect on the outcome, conceive new pathways and try again. Although it sounds old school, transformative learning is messy and inefficient. AI can effectively complement the process only in the hands of students who are, first, capable thinkers.
Research on the emerging effects of AI on learning in higher education is limited and offers mixed findings. It will take time to achieve a reliable body of knowledge. Meanwhile, it seems unwise to take the promises of self-interested corporations as actual knowledge about the benefits of incorporating AI into the learning of our students.
Achieving a university education should be a challenging, interesting and humane experience. An education driven by AI to produce workers pre-fabricated for our state’s high-tech industry promises the opposite. Perhaps our CSU chancellor and trustees, our legislative policymakers and our governor should consider seriously my granddaughter’s reasonable question.
Mark R. Stoner is a professor emeritus of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento, where he taught for 26 years and specialized in teaching instructional communication to graduate students. He is a co-founder of the campus Center for Teaching and Learning.
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