I totally agree. I think the neo-liberal university model is the real culprit. Where I live, Universities get money for each student who graduates. This is up to 100k euros for a new doctorate. This means that the University and its admin want as many students to graduate as possible. The (BA&MA) students also want to graduate in target time: if they do, they get a huge part of their student loans forgiven.
What has AI done? I teach a BA thesis seminar. Last year, when AI wasn't used as much, around 30% of the students failed to turn in their BA thesises. 30% drop-out rate was normal. This year: only 5% dropped out, while the amount of ChatGPT generated text has skyrocketed. I think there is a correlation: ChatGPT helps students write their thesises, so they're not as likely to drop out.
The University and the admins are probably very happy that so many students are graduating. But also, some colleagues are seeing an upside to this: if more graduate, the University gets more money, which means less cuts to teaching budgets, which means that the teachers can actually do their job and improve their courses, for those students who are actually there to learn. But personally, as a teacher, I'm at loss of what to do. Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be? Nobody else seems to care. Or should I pass them, let them graduate, and reserve my energy to teach those who are motivated and are willing to engage?
I think one of the outcomes might be a devaluation of the certifications offered in the public job marketplace.
I can say from some working experience in the United States that way too many jobs require a university degree. I remember being an intern or my first job after uni (which I struggled a great deal to complete), looking around and thinking: "There is no way that all of these people need a uni degree to do their jobs." I couldn't believe how easy work was compared to my uni studies (it was hell). I felt like I was playing at life with a cheat code (infinite lives, or whatever). I don't write that to brag; I am sure many people here feel the same. So many jobs at mega corps require little more than common sense: Come to work on time, dress well, say your pleases and thank yous, be compliant, do what is asked, etc. Repeat and you will have a reasonable middle class life.
Then there's Europe, where making it easy to get a master's degree just let to jobs requiring people to waste time getting yet another unneeded degree.
This entire situation is something that is predictable, and I have personally called it out years ago - not because of some unique ability, but because this is what happened in India and China decades upon decades ago.
There’s only so many jobs which have you a good salary.
So everyone had to become a doctor lawyer or engineer. Business degrees were seen as washouts.
Even for the job of a peon, you had to be educated.
So people followed incentives and got degrees - in any way or form they could.
This meant that degrees became a measure, and they were then ruthlessly optimized for, till they stopped having any ability to indicate that people were actually engineers.
So people then needed more degrees and so on - to distinguish their fitness amongst other candidates.
Education is what liberal arts colleges were meant to provide - but this worked only in an economy that could still provide employment for all the people who never wanted to be engineers, lawyers or doctors.
This mess will continue constantly, because we simply cannot match/sort humans, geographies, skills, and jobs well enough - and verifiably.
Not everyone is meant to be a startup founder. Or a doctor. Or a plumber, or a historian or an architect or an archaeologist.
It’s a jobs market problem, and has been this way ever since the American economy wasn’t able to match people with money for their skills.
Yep, it's a job market problem. Only degrees that are somehow limited in their supply will continue to hold value, the rest approach worthlessness. Neither the state nor universities have any interest to limit the supply.
In my country doctors earn huge salaries and have 100% job security, because their powerful interest groups have successfully lobbied to limit the number of grads below job market's demand. Other degrees don't come even close.
I agree. I tend to think though that the best way forward is to ignore all of these education issues and just focus on raising the floor. The difference between a "good-paying job" and a "not-so-good-paying job" should be small, and everyone should be able to have a good life regardless of what job they have. Then people can choose to go to college if they want to learn about things, and maybe to learn about subjects related to a job they want, but not because they think it's a way to make more money.
Well, see Germany. They do it pretty well. The expected lifetime earnings difference between university graduates and someone who took the trade/apprenticeship route is very similar. Does anyone know of other countries that are similar? Is it also true in Austria or Switzerland?
> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be?
No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.
That's probably what should happen, but it's not what happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff.
The person who used the AI slop blog for sources, we asked them to just remove them and resubmit. The person who hallucinated sources is however getting investigated for fabrication. But this is an incredibly long process to go through, which takes away time and energy from actual teaching / research / course prep. Most of the faculty is already overworked and on the verge of burnout (or are recovering post-burnout), so everybody tries to avoid it if they can. Besides, playing a cop is not what anybody wants to do, and its not what teaching should be about, as the original blog post mentioned. IF the University as an institution had some standards and actually valued education, it could be different. But it's not. The University only cares about some imaginary metrics, like international rankings and money. A few years ago they built a multi-million datacenter just for gathering data from everything that happens in the University, so they could make more convincing presentations for the ministry of education — to get more money and to "prove" that the money had a measurable impact. The University is a student-factory (this is a direct quote by a previous principal).
Yeah, our information and training systems are kinda failing at dealing with the reality of our actual information environment.
Take law for example and free speech - a central tenet to a functional democracy is effective ways to trade ideas.
A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech.
But I can show you that counter speech fails. We have realms upon realms of data inside tech firms and online communities that shows us the mechanics of how our information economies actually work, and counter speech does diddly squat.
Education is also stuck in a bind. People need degrees to be employable today, but the idea of education is tied up with the idea of being a good educated thinking human being.
Meaning you are someone who is engaged with the ideas and concepts of your field, and have a mental model in your head, that takes calories, training and effort to use to do complex reasoning about the world.
This is often overkill for many jobs - the issue isn’t doing high level stats in a day science role, it’s doing boring data munging and actually getting the data in the first place. (Just an example).
High quality work is hard, and demanding, and in a market with unclear signals, people game the few systems that used to be signals.
Which eventually deteriorated signal till you get this mess.
We need jobs that give a living wage, or provide a pathway to achieving mastery while working, so that the pressure on the education lever can be reduced and spread elsewhere.
> A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech.
> But I can show you that counter speech fails
Could you show me that? What's your definition of failure?
I get the feeling that you aren’t asking for the short version, because most people wouldn’t latch onto that point and create an account for it.
Hmmm.
An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts. Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people who work at fact checking orgs.
However, this is in itself too simple an example.
The mechanics of online forums are more interesting to illustrate the point - Truth is too expensive to compete with cheaper content.
Complex articles can be shared on a community, which debunk certain points, but the community doesn’t read it. They do engage heavily on emotional content, which ends up supporting their priors.
I struggle to make this point nicely, but The accuracy of your content is secondary to its value as an emotional and narrative utility for the audience.
People are not coming online to be scientists. They are coming online to be engaged. Counter speech solves the issue of inaccuracy, and is only valuable if inaccuracy is a negative force.
It is too expensive a good to produce, vs alternatives. People will coalesce around wounds and lacunae in their lives, and actively reject information that counters their beliefs. Cognitive dissonance results in mental strife and will result in people simply rejecting information rather than altering their priors.
Do note - this is a point about the efficacy of this intervention in upholding the effectiveness of the market where we exchange ideas. There will be many individual exchanges where counter speech does change minds.
But at a market level, it is ineffective as a guardian and tonic against the competitive advantage of falsehoods against facts.
——
Do forgive the disjointed quality in the response. It’s late here, and I wish I could have just linked you to a bunch of papers, but I dont think that would have been the response you are looking for.
I think this 3-part essay might be relevant to your argument: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/623330/society-of-the-psy...
I’ve been recommending network propaganda recently. The book has the data that makes the case better than I can about structural issues in the information ecosystem.
Also started going through this legal essay (paper?) recently, Lies, Counter-lies, and Disinformation in the Marketplace of Ideas
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
The book "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari essentially makes this same point. The way he phrases it is that information's primary role throughout history hasn't necessarily been to convey objective truth but to connect people and enable large scale cooperation. So more information is not necessarily better.
Worth a read or you can check out one of his recent podcast appearances for a quicker download.
> The University is a student-factory
In The Netherlands, we have a three-tier tertiary system: MBO (practical job education / trades), HBO (college job education / applied college) and WO (scientific education / university).
A lot of the fancy jobs require WO. But in my opinion, WO is much too broad a program, because it tries to both create future high tier workers as well as researchers. The former would be served much better by a reduced, focused programme, which would leave more bandwidth for future researchers to get the 'true' university education they need.
> In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff.
This is another example of "AI is exacerbating existing problems". :-) That kind of grading policy is absurd and should never have existed in the first place, but now AI is really making that obvious.
I've talked with professors at a major US research university. For Master's students, they are all paying a lot of money to get a credential. That's the transaction. They don't really care about cheating as long as they go through the motions of completing the assigned work. It's just a given, and like you say it takes more time than they have to go through the acacdemic dishonesty process for all the students who are getting outside help or (now) using AI.
> The person who used the AI slop blog for sources
You should fail them.
The larger work that the intellectual and academic forces of a liberal democracy is that of “verification”.
Part of the core part of the output, is showing that the output is actually what it claims to be.
The reproducibility crisis is a problem Precisely because a standard was missed.
In a larger perspective, we have mispriced facts and verification processes.
They are treated as public goods, when they are hard to produce and uphold.
Yet they compete with entertainment and “good enough” output, that is cheaper to produce.
The choice to fail or pass someone doesn’t address the mispricing of the output. We need new ways to address that issue.
Yet a major part of the job you do. is to hold up the result to a standard.
You and the institutions we depend on will continue to be crushed by these forces. Dealing with that is a separate discussion from the pass or fail discussion.
Fail them. Only let the ai generated text that has been verified and edited to be true to pass.
If they want to use AI make them use it right.
> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be?
I don't think you should fail them - instead, give them feedback on how to improve their thesis themselves, and how to make better use of tools like ChatGPT.
If instead of flat out failing to turn in their thesis, instead they are submitting work that needs more iteration due to bad use of AI, that sounds like a net win to me. The latter can be turned into something useful.