Death to AI

I am absolutely disgusted by any professor who uses ChatGPT or other AI to do their jobs:

In February, Ella Stapleton, then a senior at Northeastern University, was reviewing lecture notes from her organizational behavior class when she noticed something odd. Was that a query to ChatGPT from her professor?

Halfway through the document, which her business professor had made for a lesson on models of leadership, was an instruction to ChatGPT to “expand on all areas. Be more detailed and specific.” It was followed by a list of positive and negative leadership traits, each with a prosaic definition and a bullet-pointed example.

Ms. Stapleton texted a friend in the class.

“Did you see the notes he put on Canvas?” she wrote, referring to the university’s software platform for hosting course materials. “He made it with ChatGPT.”

“OMG Stop,” the classmate responded. “What the hell?”

Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.

She was not happy. Given the school’s cost and reputation, she expected a top-tier education. This course was required for her business minor; its syllabus forbade “academically dishonest activities,” including the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence or chatbots.

“He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself,” she said.

Ms. Stapleton filed a formal complaint with Northeastern’s business school, citing the undisclosed use of A.I. as well as other issues she had with his teaching style, and requested reimbursement of tuition for that class. As a quarter of the total bill for the semester, that would be more than $8,000.

….

For their part, professors said they used A.I. chatbots as a tool to provide a better education. Instructors interviewed by The New York Times said chatbots saved time, helped them with overwhelming workloads and served as automated teaching assistants.

Their numbers are growing. In a national survey of more than 1,800 higher-education instructors last year, 18 percent described themselves as frequent users of generative A.I. tools; in a repeat survey this year, that percentage nearly doubled, according to Tyton Partners, the consulting group that conducted the research. The A.I. industry wants to help, and to profit: The start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic recently created enterprise versions of their chatbots designed for universities.

While I do not as a general rule think that professors have a hard job (sorry, my dad worked in a plywood mill, that’s a hard job, just because you have to grade a bunch of papers does not make your job hard and I next see a classroom in September so if that’s you, no right to complain), I do recognize that for non-tenure track faculty, there can be an overwhelming amount of stuff to do. But to use ChatGPT is simply an abandonment of your job and any ethical considerations. Students should be outraged! The reality is that a lot of professors are really lazy.

I have pledged to myself to refuse to use any AI in any way possible. If that makes me an anachronism, well, I’m in my 50s now so I am old enough to embrace it. Obviously one cannot completely ignore such an overwhelming technology. But I can try. What’s even the point of living if you are outsourcing everything in your life to a goddamn computer program?