Dr. Bob's Blog

mæd.nəs (noun) behavior or thinking that is very foolish or dangerous: extreme folly.

Have you heard? Colleges and Universities are in trouble nine ways from Sunday. There is unaffordability, the tuition debacle, and declining enrollment; there is diminished academic freedom and suppression of free speech; there are warring factions, politicization, and courses become propaganda.  There is turning college into (pretend) businesses and their presidents into (pretend) CEOs. There is an obscene increase in administrators in relation to a reduction in teachers and teaching. There is the research reproducibility crisis and the failed EdTech revolution. And, at this writing, there are higher rates of unemployment for college grads than for the general population. Was that nine?

But, don’t worry, none of that matters.

Why? Because AI has arrived! The mad enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence in Education is stunning, especially if you exclude the views of most teachers and students. AI Enthusiasts are administrators, technologists, developers, consultants, and investors…the self-proclaimed Innovators who mostly ignore those 9 ways to Sunday woes. Impossible? Not for these Techno-Optimists. Read on and remember that these mad people are not bad people, but they have deeply engaged folly in a land of (artificial) wonder. This essay will review the current AI Wonderland against the original, in bold, published on November 26, 1865. First, from the White Queen:

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Some impossible things:

1 “AI in education is moving fast. AI will not replace teachers- it will empower great educators”.
2  “AI is reshaping education- not by replacing teachers but by amplifying their impact”.
3 “As AI begins to transform various sectors, education is no exception”.
4 “AI is no longer the future of education, its becoming the foundation of smarter schools”.
5 “…a fantastic guidebook to place AI at the center of your course”
6 “Artificial Intelligence in education is transforming learning through Intelligent technology…But it’s also making it harder to stand out (emphasis added). That’s the paradox nobody expected”.

The irony of that last observation on banality is not lost among the professors and students and researchers sounding the alarm on AI in education. After all, with AI homogeneity, essays, charts, projects and proposals kinda all look the same–nothing stands out! More critical onlookers call it AI Slop. This madness is pervasive. Alice wanted nothing of her own Wonderland madness:

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’

These mad (not bad) people are everywhere in Academia. Pity Alice and pity the teachers and students surrounded by madness. For the pro AI in Education Crowd is mad and massive, and has the full backing of Universities, who have the full backing of (guess who) the trillion-dollar AI industry.

In fact a state University President recently got as artificial as it gets when she introduced her own customized AI Avatar that announced “I am thrilled to share this moment with you…It’s only fitting isn’t it? After all, technology is a cornerstone of what makes (the) University such an incredible place to learn, innovate, and grow.”  For this “incredible place” Open AI secured a cool 16.9 million-dollar payday from the University system. Madness.

Meanwhile, outside of Wonderland, research has identified significant dangers for students who use artificial intelligence. Specifically, it can promote a decline in content knowledge and loss of critical thinking skills related to cognitive “off-loading” and cognitive “surrender”. If graduates copy and paste AI answers for four years, what have they really learned… or earned? Of what value is a diploma? Innovators in Wonderland conspicuously ignore such research and those troubling questions.

Students who resist AI use might be at a real or imagined disadvantage compared to their AI avid classmates. So they join in–it has been a bandwagon becoming full.  After all, grades are at stake and you “gotta do what you gotta do” to be successful, right? Well not quite. Consider the college grad employment data mentioned at the outset of this essay. Or the riveting occasions where commencement speakers extolling AI have been roundly booed by graduate victims of the technology. Maybe AI is not the path to success. Band-wagoned students might be jumping off for their lives and their futures. Fewer students will be jumping on for the ride to a meaningless, copy and paste degree.

So how do these AI Innovators maintain their enthusiasm against the research evidence and the growing number of skeptics? Wonderland enthusiasts might answer that it is the AI Adventure that really matters: the flashy AI-generated slides, posters, and presentations, as well as the applause, thumbs up and like-buttons from fellow users. Not the boring and off-message explanations of researchers or the angst of key stakeholders. After all, The Gryphon proclaimed

“The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”

One more thing. Administrations promote AI use not just to students, but to Professors themselves. More automation, more applications to handle every aspect of the teaching process: grading, feedback, teaching assisting, rewriting long articles into brief summaries, slide generation; AI for creating lessons, syllabi, and leveled texts. Enthused Professors buy in. Alert Professors begin to understand that they are training their replacement.

Unless wiser minds prevail, AI will rule Higher Education. Students and teachers will go through the motions of Knowledge, while knowing less and even forgetting how to know.

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

And when it comes to the immense problems colleges and universities face, Artificial Intelligence will not be the solution. It will be the knock out punch.