A professor uses AI to generate their lecture outline and slides, because it saves them time; their students then use AI to summarize the lecture, because it's easier than taking notes themselves. The TA, overworked and underpaid, uses AI to generate the class assignments, which the students use AI to answer - and once they're handed in, the TA uses AI to grade them, too. The professor then uses AI to make the final exam, which the students use AI to answer, and which the professor and TA again use AI to grade. The semester ends, and none of the human participants have materially done any work. Who benefits from this?
It's not the professor, whose skills begin to atrophy due to cognitive offloading, nor is it the students, who never develop those skills in the first place. And it's certainly not TA, because in a scenario where this level of AI use is normalized - which is what the AI companies want - they've functionally made themselves redundant. If the AI can do a TA's job, then who needs a TA? Come to that, if the AI can do a professor's job, then who needs a professor? And if the AI can do a student's job, then who needs to be a student? Why do any of these people need to be here at all? Why even have a university? To which the tech giants reply: pfft, never mind the ever-mounting financial, environmental, ethical and social costs of AI - isn't using it just easier?
Well, yes - in the same way that it's easier to die than live. Death, after all, is a tremendously simplifying affair. You don't need to learn or study or struggle or suffer or love or err or improve or feel or encounter setbacks or wrestle with anything difficult at all when you don't exist - and this, too, ultimately, is the lure of AI: to outsource the fundamental business of being human; which is to say, of living. But as this would make a rather terrible sales pitch, it's presented instead, not just as convenience, but as an exclusive convenience - one whose power is predicated on others being too stupid or moral or Luddite to do likewise.
Thus: students are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more quickly progress through their studies, while universities are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more easily manage students. Both groups are told that using AI will help them keep up with their workload while surpassing the competition; that it will free up extra time to do more enjoyable things, and that, the more others use it, the more necessary it becomes to use it yourself. But the implication is still that the traditional professional, social and intellectual systems that AI intends to parasitize will continue to exist - because if they didn't, what would be the point in using AI to cheat at them?
The best-case scenario is that life becomes like an Olympics at which everyone is doping - which, as we recently saw with the Enhanced Games, turns out to be a fairly dismal prospect. Counter to the assumption that PEDs would cause the contestants to surpass all previous human limits, only one world record was actually (barely) broken and, in fact, multiple victories were claimed by non-enhanced athletes. In a lesson that AI shills would do well to learn from, it turns out that raw human effort, ingenuity and skill are actually the biggest factors in human success, and that whatever minor advantage you might gain from cheating is annihilated in a context where the whole field is doing it.
The worst-case scenario is that we irreparably break several centuries' worth of our most collectively vital institutions, innovations and accomplishments so that a handful of the very worst people on Earth can, briefly, be richer than god.
So, no: just because the AI industry has baited a hook for college students with the promise of Finish All Your Assignments Faster And Worse (While Getting Stupider) does not mean you have to swallow it. Use your own brain! Civilization will thank you for it.
