AI Is Dumbing Us Down! (Not)

It's not cheating to use an AI, it's inevitable. Deal with it.

This morning, I was reading an article about U.C. Berkeley students effectively cheating with AI [https://t.ly/yPj8F]. People are, of course, wailing and gnashing their teeth over the state of higher education, saying that AI is dumbing down our entire society. They say students aren't actually learning anything anymore. Honestly, I think the problem isn't that AI is destroying the world, but that we aren't adapting how we teach to the new tools. Hidebound "institutions of higher learning" (that identifier is emblematic of the problem) are complaining rather than adapting.

Newspapers handled this same problem in the same ineffective way. They finagled themselves into nonexistence by hoping the problem would just go away, as some do with AI, even still. Only recently have the remaining players been doing what they should have been doing all along (paywalls with metered free access, for example). The problem is that they were moaning about "the death of the newspaper" instead of adapting.

Universities seem to be taking the same route: making themselves irrelevant by failing to adapt. They cling to old ways of working, wasting money on tools like AI-content detection that reinforce those old habits and solve nothing. It's an arms race. Instead, teach in a way that AI doesn't matter.

Back in the good old days of the 12th century, when the first universities appeared, there were no written papers (which is the only place where "AI cheating" is an issue). People went to lectures. They read books. They discussed things with each other and their teachers. Learning happened. Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne still have that way of teaching in their DNA, nine centuries later. The problem isn't that AI is somehow destroying the notion of education. All it's done is obscoleted one entirely optional pedagogic approach (papers graded in the background by TAs or, ironically, by AIs). A return to a lecture-and-discussion pedagogy fixes the problem.

I guess my main point is that whenever there's change, agility is essential. Don't complain; do something!