Welcome to Campus. Here's Your ChatGPT.

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life.

If the company’s strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test.

OpenAI dubs its sales pitch “A.I.-native universities.”

“Our vision is that, over time, A.I. would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,” Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon “every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized A.I. account.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/chatgpt-openai-colleges.html

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This is horrifying.

This is also NOT really about education.

There's a much more accurate description later in the article, when it says this is "part of an escalating A.I. arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots" to try to turn students into future customers.

The article points out this is "a national experiment on millions of students" when there's already evidence it harms critical thinking.

This is extremely cynical, predatory marketing by OpenAI, with students pawns in the tech bros' AI arms race.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did incalculable damage to education worldwide when he released ChatGPT 2-1/2 years ago. Now OpenAI's "VP of education" envisions students taking the chatbot they'll be forced to use in college into their careers, using it for life.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. There would be no time to do the ordinary reading, thinking, studying, living of student life

This is a really, really bad idea imho. I can't keep up with all of today's AI, webinars, videos, upskills, computing, and I'm not a student.

AI would in my view lead to brain-dead curricula, lack of thinking, poor prep for exams.

Brains need repetition, mental imaging, free-form pursuit. AI is a fail on all of that.

[SheltieLover]

2. I couldn't agree more!

I hate ai.

[highplainsdem]

4. This will destroy education - except for teaching students to use bots and become dependent on them.

[SheltieLover]

3. Why would any school agree to this?

[highplainsdem]

5. Part of it is FOMO - fear of missing out on using AI as fast as the AI companies say you have to

use it.

And part is greed, because while the AI companies try to convince people AI won't replace them but will just make their work easier, those companies are simultaneously telling the top people at any business or school they're trying to sell to that using AI will let them lay off a lot of people.

[SheltieLover]

12. I've already personally heard from people that that've lost jobs to ai.

[cadoman]

10. there's through the roof risk/reward on this

AI has the potential to give students highly individuated attention for as long as they like, at extremely low cost.

The risk is really in how the AI is managed. How trustworthy the operators of it are, what they intend to teach the kids. Really, similar risks as with humans but at larger scale.

[FakeNoose]

6. That's how Zuckerberg made his first million ...

He called his app "Facebook" because it was simpler times back then. But it's 2025, and college students have much higher expectations these days.

[Lucky Luciano]

7. The toothpaste isn't going back into the tube.

Adaptation is the only way.

[highplainsdem]

8. We're seeing a con job. They're peddling badly flawed tech. This is not progress. Or toothpaste.

And "adaptation" is dumbing people down and handing more and more power to tech bros.

[Lucky Luciano]

9. Strongly disagree

I get tremendous value from Claude and chatgpt.

Adaptation is possible.

A professor can ask an LLM to write a custom exam for every student based on work they turned in for example. The cheaters and non critical thinkers will be outed fast. Just one example.

[highplainsdem]

11. What do you use those bots for?

[Lucky Luciano]

13. Mostly to improve coding or get to the point on some mathematical concepts I want clarity on.

I might have some code that works…I ask it to make it much faster because I know there is a way because python is slow unless you can get it to use some C code in the right library. It actually got the answer wrong, but it introduced me to the key functionality I didn’t know existed. I used that functionality to get what I wanted and the millions of matrix multiplications I needed were done about 1000x faster. This was huge for me. I continue to use that functionality to this day. It was a gem… numpy.einsum.

I’m also teaching myself a lot of convex optimization right now and I have a great book and YouTube lectures from Steven Boyd himself…when I want clarity on some concepts, it is really good.

On the lighter side, I’m domestically declined. My son had a leftover Burger King whopper (gross!), so I asked it what the best way to reheat it was. Perfect result.

Many other use cases.

[highplainsdem]

16. See reply 14, which I'd started writing before I got a phone call. I didn't see your reply here before I

posted it.

You're basically just using ChatGPT to substitute for looking something up or asking for help in a forum. You know that chatbots can also give wrong answers, and you just admitted that ChatGPT didn't give you the right answer, but included something useful.

A slight convenience for you doesn't begin to outweigh the intellectual property theft for that AI's training data, or all the other harm done by AI.

[Lucky Luciano]

17. Yes it can give incorrect results or partially correct results. Critical thinking is still required indeed.

I would say it’s been much more than a slight convenience. One has to use it the right way for best results. I also need results fast. If I can skip forums, I’m happy to do so. Pressure on me is always very high and everyone else uses it.

The Industrial Revolution was very disruptive too. That toothpaste never went back in either. Best we can do is adapt as intelligently as possible.

[highplainsdem]

14. Never mind. I found one of your earlier pro-AI posts.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220299102#post35

Fwiw, you didn't need ChatGPT for that. You could have found that online by googling or asking for help at Stack Overflow.

[Lucky Luciano]

15. Yup...Google does a decent job of using LLMs for this sort of thing.

The example I gave was the first big win I had with an LLM. I haven’t gone near stackoverflow since then.

Google works for the simple example I gave.

Using the bots though, it asks me if I want more information on targeted follow up questions that are quite good. I will often ask for those details or provide my own follow ups that are answered with the full context of the entire “conversation.” If it’s not for you, that’s fine, but I get value.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

20. Even before AI, I could feel myself "dumbing down" due to technology

I no longer memorize phone numbers; they are simply added to the list in my smart phone.

I don't do "long division"; I have a calculator app for that.

I don't do my own taxes on a paper-spitting calculator; I use a tax program.

When I was still working as a programmer, I stopped much of my coding. Things went much faster if I googled objects/classes for the javacode I was producing. So much work is already done, and it's free.

I don't even think too much about voting. Just pick column "D"

[Karasu]

18. Regulate. Motherfucking. AI.

This fascist-ass regime insists on doing the opposite and the insane AI provision in this insane bill needs to be fucking killed now. It is beyond imperative.

[orleans]

19. reading, writing, reasoning, critical thinking, social skills, memory, learning, creativity -- will become

obsolete