AI is hollowing out higher education

Modern AI technologies severely impede humans’ ability to learn and retain skills, while also making it nearly impossible for academics and other experts to cultivate and disseminate knowledge.

- Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij

Many scholars, including us, have highlighted the threat posed by techno-solutionism in education: Rather than expanding our intellectual horizons, these technologies undermine the very conditions that allow us to think for ourselves.

The corporations profiting from AI - including Microsoft, OpenAl, Nvidia, and ASML ~ have a vested interest in maintaining the current hype. Their oligopolistic control over both hardware and software depends on the exaggerated claim that cognitive labor can be fully outsourced to their models.

In reality, the apparent achievements of these systems rest on the wholesale theft of humans’ intellectual labor. Most notably, large language models (LLMs) have been trained by scraping books and scholarly works without the authors’ or publishers’ consent, fragmenting and remixing them into patchwork plagiarism packaged as human-like responses.

According to the AI industry’s narrative, all human creativity, innovation, and knowledge are essentially automatable, rendering people obsolete. Even advocates of “human-centered AI” assume this to be true.