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For years I have been stating that the university as we know it has been over for a while. I have also stated that the professoriate is dead. Especially for most of those who exist in the social sciences and the humanities, this demise is not necessarily a bad thing. I have written about the professoriate’s hatred of America and of capitalism, the ascendent socialist mindset, and the Marxist indoctrination by the professoriate of our youth. Despite these thoughts and insights, I never thought that I would stand before a class and feel my complete irrelevance as an educator; feel like a relic and some strange creature that should be retired instantly. And all because of an AI language model called Chat GPT.
Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The tool itself and professors are in an arms race against each other – and professors are losing. It usually takes weeks to collect students’ papers after posting an assignment. Deadlines are mostly a thing of the past. When Chat GPT was first launched, however, I had at least nine students turning in well-crafted, eight-page papers within an hour of posting the assignment.
After being a professor in the classroom for twenty-six years, I still spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for my classes. They are a combination of short lectures interspersed with discussion from students. I call on students frequently to respond to what they have read, and to offer analyses made by other students on the assigned readings. This allows us to form a community of thinkers and discoverers—of both fact and values. As a philosophic community we form a “brain attic.” Knowledge is shared collectively but processed individually. At any point each person can share his or her rendition of the facts and concomitant analysis of said facts.
Recently students have been coming to classes late or not at all. Some come to record the classes and type pertinent questions gleaned from the lecture into Chat GPT. Others are fact checking every utterance I make against the wisdom of the AI program. But when I asked a student for his reasoned viewpoint to a point John Locke made in his classic “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” the student typed the question into his computer and said: “It says here that….” and proceeded to read off the AI generated response. In the manner of most students, he made zero eye contact with me. Today, fewer and fewer students are looking at their professors during conversations, lectures and even during in-class discussions. I am speaking of polite and basically good human beings whose socialization via social media has left them bereft of appropriate social skills.
Banning computers in the classroom is pointless. Most students would rather endure the repercussions than sit through one-and-a-half hours of classes without their gadgets. As my student read what sounded like a vague, generic, and trite response—which had already been offered as a possible objection and had been debunked in class two days prior—I felt my irrevocable sense of irrelevance. It was accompanied by a cold shudder. The world suddenly felt flatlined, amorphous, and closed-in. The sky seemed to have disappeared.
In that moment I could imagine the future. Why would students pay enormous sums of money to sit before a professor when, in their minds, they could receive a substantial education from an AI configuration? The student seemed satisfied with his answer. I did something, though, that unless one is almost manically motivated, Chat GPT cannot do and, therefore, will impair one’s capacity to use one’s brain even further and to acquire knowledge and to learn. I asked him a set of follow-up questions that would get him outside his own cognitive siloization. The questions were: What does freedom mean to you and why? What type of freedom would you rationally defend based on what you’ve learned about freedom so far? What principle of adjudication would you use to arbitrate among disputing conceptions of freedom competing for supercedence in the society you live in?
He looked a bit overwhelmed. I told him the answers were all there in his mind. He just had to think. After class, we had a small talk. I chided him gently about outsourcing his mind to an AI configuration in any area where his mind was called to respond to a question pertaining to the realm of values. He acquiesced.
I have three primary goals as a university teacher. The first is to explicate the texts I teach as thoroughly as possible and to do so with integrity, style and respect while simultaneously training students to engage the texts critically. I believe that there is a place for formal lectures in the classroom. However, I always devote a great deal of time to discussion and, when possible, to individual presentations. I will quite frequently practice a one-on-one Socratic type of inquiry with each student in the classroom at some point. I think the students truly enjoy this. For up to five minutes at a time I work intensely with his or her viewpoint. I challenge the student to examine the more nuanced dimensions of the idea and offer conceptual corrections when necessary. I think each student eagerly awaits his or her turn knowing I will eventually engage him or her. My goal is to create an atmosphere where philosophy can be practiced in a very exhilarating and rigorous manner.
My second goal is derived partially from the first. I think that one of the major goals of a liberal arts education is one that tries to develop an expanded consciousness in its students. Education is seen not just as engagement with texts because they are important texts. It is embraced as a quest to explore the historical, present, and future sense of the human world with an answer to the questions: what is the good life and what are the indispensable social goods that one needs to live a good life? Since education continues the process of socialization, however, I am in a position in my role as a philosopher in the classroom to provide them with the various textual and pedagogical resources to comprehend, process, and analyze the knowledge they have absorbed. Hopefully this empowers them to arrive at fruitful ways of interpreting that knowledge as it comes to bear on the very complex world we live in. If the course has magnified their understanding of the past and the present and gives them some purchase on the future, then I think that I have fulfilled one of my major responsibilities in the classroom. While I challenge students by encouraging them to examine their assumptions, beliefs, and traditions, I do not proselytize in the classroom and refrain from any overt politicization of the material under study.
My third goal is to develop and embody standards of excellence in myself as a moral intellectual in the classroom. By demonstrating how a committed philosopher who has charged himself with the highest standards of execution functions, I believe my students will come closer to understanding many of the ideas to which they are being exposed. In the person of their professor, they see that there is no distinction between philosophical life and ordinary living. At the end of their college tenure each student should emerge as a rational, autonomous, and sovereign individual capable of understanding the world he or she lives in, and capable of navigating the word with an ability to create a life plan for him- or herself.
There is much here that an AI configuration might be able to replicate in the future. I’m not sure. I know for now that in bypassing the community of the classroom which involves tapping into the collective brain attic of one’s colleagues—a direct referent whose mind you can spontaneously engage with, and one that is mediated by the “stuff” that constitutes the personal identity of that individual—wisdom is not possible to attain. For indeed, it is in encountering and often countenancing the autonomy and sovereignty of others and their exercise of these attributes which allow us to experience the sublime, serendipity, spontaneous insight, intellectual intimacy, and cognitive breakthroughs. The pauses, the repetition of a question whose repeated utterance is delivered in a different tone of voice that triggers an insight, the gaze held between interlocutors as they exchange ideas that communicate emotions that mediate the cold dissecting hand of reason deployed in rational argumentation—all these phenomena work themselves on the mind in a manner that connects us to the humanity of others, and that tethers us to our own. Even the most brilliant egomaniac can still be told he’s a bumbling idiot by a person of modest intelligence and be left wondering hours later: Am I really?
My students and others, in trusting AI configuration to take precedence over their own independent value judgments, are acting on the premise that AI models can make faster calculations for them and, that with a codified history of pattern recognition of their tastes, judgments, likes and dislikes, and behavioral repertoire, they can commit to a degree of accuracy that which is one’s rational long-term self-interest. One can easily imagine asking a device if one should have salmon or steak for dinner and the AI bot responding: based on your blood pressure and cholesterol readings today and the past six months which have been growing progressively higher, I would suggest neither. Going forward, I am placing you on a plant-based diet.
I mentioned that one of my goals as a professor in the classroom was to develop excellence in my character in such a manner that students could pin their aspirational identities on the trait itself. It is not hard to imagine that AI bots will assume agency soon; phenomena with perfect agency especially if they are programmed with a multiplicity of religious and secular moral systems. If they can make ethical decisions for us (including situational ones) based on their understanding of our eccentricities, our preferences and proclivities, sensibilities, and a pre-programmed algorithm to satisfy the pleasure principle in our psyche, then it’s not even clear why people would need Church, God, or the individual exercise of their own rational faculties.
The machine itself would have become not even a new digital deity—which it already is but, rather, the Deity for a new race of trans-humans, those for whom freedom, autonomy and personal sovereignty are already anachronisms.
The choice was clear for me on that day I felt my irrelevance accompanied by a cold shudder: either I morph into something radically different and transform my mind and, perhaps, my body into a different kind of thing—or face extinction as the human being I know myself to be.
The shock of the new weighs upon me.
“ Why would students pay enormous sums of money to sit before a professor?”
I have no idea to be frank. I attended university as a mature student and nothing in the experience inspired me really, I was there because I couldn’t grow my career without a degree. The only reason I needed a degree was because the hierarchy said I needed one. I didn’t learn much more than I could in a one week hands on training course.
Sadly too many training courses are simply listening to a trainer talking through slideshows.
Recently this month I enrolled in online course at UMASS Global with Chris Baron MFA course monitor. English 103. Random YouTube videos taken off the Net substitute for lectures. There was this lady from LUND university (Sweden) in a video about creative writing process. I posted a response that she was fragmented, assembly line, industrial in her process. I stated in a posting that A.E, Hotchner reported in his book “Papa Hemingway” that Hem. was able to write “Old Man and the Sea” in whole without an edit–as if it was already written in the subconscious. Asked course monitor to explain his creative writing process–he is an author. No answer. No response to contradictions of Swedish YouTube. Online education does not value the human mind. There are no teachers; there is nothing but empty web pages of useless information, no integration with great ideas of the past with the present. It is a wasteland.
It is important to remember that Chat GPT is not infallible and all-knowing.
Polish history is of great interest to me and as an experiment, I decided to ask, via prompts, Chat GPT about a certain aspect I had sound knowledge of and part of the answer Chat GPT gave back was to suggest my question was inaccurate and close to a “conspiracy theory” claim. However, when I submitted my well-respected and authoritative reference sources Chat GPT replied “i apologize for my previous comments which were wrong”, and accepted that it had learned something new. To which I smiled to myself.
True. Just recently: A Lawyer’s Filing “Is Replete with Citations to Non-Existent Cases”—Thanks, ChatGPT? The lawyer’s colleague, who drafted the filing, says he relied on ChatGPT to draft the filing and provide the text of the cases, and neglected to check them.
Yes, Ive heard it is hit and miss. Sometimes accurate references, sometimes just fabricated. Well, if the AI references what is online then that is the left in which everything may be fabricated or partly fabricated and then changed the next day with no consequences. So, why shouldn’t their baby, the AI, do the same?
It doesn’t really matter if Chat GPT makes errors. The students get angry that the professor will not accept the errors. They also are in disbelief that they are expected to think and come up with their own original thoughts. I’ve told my students for 20 years they need to listen to their instructor. “We are hired because we have expertise to share. Otherwise, a bot could do this job.” Now a bot will be doing the job, sadly. And to anyone who disagrees with this, you’ll be blindsided by its repercussions.
AI vs God. I would bet on God 🙂
I asked ChatGPT; “In 50 words AI vs God”
ChatGPT Response:
“AI, a product of human ingenuity, is an advanced technology capable of processing vast amounts of data and executing complex tasks. God, a concept rooted in faith and spirituality, is believed to be a supreme being with divine attributes. While AI can simulate intelligence, it cannot encompass the transcendence associated with the concept of God.”
I think ChatGPT agrees with you 🙂
Great point, Algorithmic Analyst. Because Chat GPT will not only
answer whether or not to have steak or salmon for dinner but
will answer questions related to right or wrong.
And it is in that striving within ourselves to make a conscious
choice of right over wrong that we acquire spiritual wisdom
in serving a higher good or God. If Chat GPT does our moral
thinking and choosing for us, we are tyrannized.
Serving a higher good or God? What precisely do you mean by a higher good or God?
If a higher good, which is higher than the life of man, higher than the life of the individual, higher than man, every man, higher than the individual, every individual, then every man is tyrannized by that allegedly higher good. He must become the servant of that higher good, regardless of what that higher good consists of.
It’s called altruism, which literally means “otherism”. In order to be moral man must sacrifice himself to an other higher good outside of himself, his life, his happiness.
“If a man believes that the good is intrinsic in certain actions, he will not hesitate to force others to perform them. If he believes that the human benefit or injury caused by such actions is of no significance, he will regard a sea of blood as of no significance. If he believes that the beneficiaries of such actions are irrelevant (or interchangeable), he will regard wholesale slaughter as his moral duty in the service of a “higher” good. It is the intrinsic theory of values that produces a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Hitler. It is not an accident that Eichmann was a Kantian.” – Ayn Rand
What a fascinating article. Thank you, Dr. Hill. Unlike your students’
pied piper ChatGPT – you really made me stop and think.
Many Thanks for the kind words and your appreciation.
My many queries with AI on basic philosophical concepts left me pondering.
Human reasoning incorporates two realms that AI, at least for now, can’t access… That of physical pain and human suffering.
Physical pain aside, which we all deal with in its myriad manifestations, dwell upon the breadth and scope of human suffering over the millennia; a type of pain that, we as individuals might never have to experience; whereas millions of other souls were forced to endure the agony of war, famine, disease, nature’s wrath, et. al.
And does this matter when making “rational” decisions?
Without the REALITY of life and death, pain and pleasure, happiness and misery, no rational or irrational decisions would be possible or necessary. If you choose to live you must make moral choices to stay alive. Life and the improvement of life is the standard of a rational moral code, the reality of the requirements of a human, biological, life on earth. Reason is man’s means of knowledge about REALITY, logic is the method of non-contradictory identification that reason employs to discover the facts of reality.
What is man’s reality? His reality is that he is a mortal, biological, animal with a reasoning mind and no instincts for survival. As such he must use his reasoning mind to discover and produce all the values, material and spiritual, he needs and desires to maintain his life and happiness.
Human intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom evolved and developed because we are biological, flesh, blood, and nerves MORTALS.
Without our constant, inescapable, life and death mortal and fragile condition our intelligence, awareness, memory, reasoning minds, wisdom, would have no impetus, stimulus, to emerge and develop through the evolutionary process. Without our incessant need to produce the values that keep us alive and ward off death our human intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom would not have evolved or developed.
A machine does not share the mortal and fragile condition that makes us human, which is the crucial stimulus to the human hunger and search for values. Without that fundamental and crucial condition, I don’t see how a machine can give a damn about life and death and thereby become superior to humans.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of “Life” that makes the concept of “Value” possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” – John Galt, “Atlas Shrugged”
A professor friend from Emerson College in Boston said she just keeps dumbing her exams down considerably (now instead of 1 in class exam there are 4 very easy take home exams) since her students are incapable of doing actual studying or work. The level of idiocy in America is off the charts.
I just attended New College of FL’s commencement where every single graduate turned their backs to Scott Atlas. The speaker, and screamed through his entire speech. This happened with the full support of faculty.
Why on earth normal teachers don’t simply fail all of their useless students is beyond me.
Jason, if your students use chat gps– fail them. Get some standards for your classroom– don’t just complain on the internet. Do something.
The few intelligent teachers left in America ought to just start their own schools. There are still a handful if parents who care — although there are millions more who can’t stand their own kids– seeing what duds they all are today.
Victor Hansen has touched on this… saying why spend so much on tuition when, with the click of a mouse, you can learn from some of the finest minds in the world, if you choose to learn on your own.
Thanks. No, I am taking action! Trust me. The article was meant as less of a complaint and more of a warning and a desire to share my experiences.
I don’t understand this dumbing down of exams. The point of education is to be ‘learning up’.
If the idiot class can’t manage the basics of that, then just fail the lot of them.
Long before AI came on the scene, the trend of students not showing up for class, not paying attention, not doing assigned work was already in firmly in place. Laptops, cell phones, AirPods, you name it, anything to detract from the person standing in front of the room. AI will do an even “better” job.
Don’t forget that AI is a computer program written by humans, and is fed data and opinions by humans. The data and opinions vary in compleity, but are programmed by humans with some sort of agenda. It will definitely be used to attempt control of the beliefs and opinions and behaviors of humans.. It can be programmed to order the enforcement of evil or good. If the human programmers creating it enable it to control human behavior is it the fault or success of the programmers when it makes evil decisions or good decisions? Can evil people use it to evade responsibility for evil decisions? If AI is programmed to develop itself into an entity which can compel humans to act in one way or another then it is inherently bad. just like human behaviors. Is AI a tool to control humans? If AI is given power it will become corrupted according to the old adage “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
AI essentially has the same proc;ivity to evil as humans and humans definitely have a proclivity to evil. Humans must have limits on what they can force other humans to do or not do, so also must AI.
I agree. I see AI as the same internet lefty BS with cute bells and whistles. 20 years ago, in graduate school, students were cutting and pasting and handing in papers pieced together -really plagiarism. Now theres no need to cut and paste. The AI does it for them.
I tried AI for the work I do and it wrote more grammatically correct than I do but soullessly. It sounded just like a didactic condescending trite leftwing cookie cutter article. Its still garbage in and garbage out no matter how cleverly chatty the AI appears to be.
Its a gimmick not a takeover.
. .
I disagree so thoroughly with Dr. Hill’s premonitions of irrelevance. This essay alone screams the necessity for his kind to continue to teach at universities. His questions aimed at forcing the students to actually think for themselves, without AI, will ALWAYS be necessary for human beings to grow. Did you not see there was pleasure in them when you did this? They are human. They MUST have it.
AI can figure out our tastes to a large extent, and nudge us constantly in accordance with its calculations, but AI cannot change us in accordance with our unique ways of being to become the most virtuous, powerful and happy of people. That requires challenges and corrections given by others who have other experiences, thoughts and contexts.
Dr. Hill, you must NEVER despair. I know that most of your students seem lost, but they are young. Some of them, will discover early they cannot live without truth and reality. AI will not satisfy this basic human need, even as it is helpful. You will have been instrumental in that process of discovery for many of them, though you may not see it.
Jeez, it’s a dumb machine. Spend some time with it, ask some questions about arcane areas of knowledge or analysis you may happen to know about, even ask it if AIs will ever replace humans or take over the world. It gives refreshingly pedestrian, non-commital answers. We love to anthropomorphize — in this case AI as human — because we see the world as humans and feel most comfortable when its elements are human-like. Assuredly this is only our own natural and good bias. People with actual questioning minds and the need to explore reality from all aspects of what it means to be human will find AI severely limited. It’s a big upgrade on encyclopaedias, and it can write in a mediocre manner, even poetry. Even if programmers find a way to imitate the idiosyncrasies of human genius, who cares. We all know it’s only a machine simply doing what we program it to do. The dark side of this situation lies in the ability of sociopaths to program it for ill. That is what we must guard against.
(The above was written by ChatGPT 5:05 PM 31 May 2023)
(Just kidding)
The proper term for AI is “Consensus Intelligence”” as the input grows with time but will never encompass all facts, all truth, and all reasoning. Unfortunately it also is a deceptive tool , and lacks the meaning of loving and serving that Jesus commands those who accept redemption and new life (Gospel of John 15:9-12). Like all technology, it can be a force for good or harm.
If AI brings us a greater understanding of humanity and the world we live in, then I embrace it. If it doesn’t then humanity remains as it is, thus, AI will fail.
AI will never replace reading. So, instead of setting ourselves up as an exemplar of what an educator is, let’s get our young people reading and forget about what universities expect professors to write in their pedagogical statements to convince administration that they are worthy. If you are a University Lecturer (stop calling yourself a teacher), then you are necessarily worthy. Own it, man. And continue to challenge students to “think.” It’s a thing. Students are hungry for it. And students are great at sniffing out bs. I encourage my students to fact-check. But then, I generally know my stuff.
“Why would students pay enormous sums of money to sit before a professor?”
I had a philosophy professor who jokingly said that once money was invented all other arguments were null and void. Your statement and his are revealing. You could have stopped there. The cost of a higher education increasingly puts it out of reach for many people. And unless you get a STEM degree you may just be setting yourself up for usurious loans and future employment disappointment. This makes classes like required philosophy electives stumbling blocks on the way to gainful employment. But, you shouldn’t cheat to get though a class. And if you are using Chat GPT to cheat that’ s a different issue. The other issue in parallel with paying enormous sums of money to a professor is being taught by professors that really cant or don’t teach. Which has been alluded to in many of the comments. In this regard chat GPT, Youtube, and so many other internet sites are educational Godsends. This applies to all STEM subjects and the humanities. The internet is not going away. We should be teaching students how to use it.