Studying Smarter with AI?

Max Gottschlich on sense and nonsense when using AI in academia.

- Max Gottschlich

Artificial intelligence is becoming an ubiquitous companion in our lives and institutions. As we strive for greater convenience and efficiency, we're increasingly outsourcing our intellectual activities in judging, reasoning, and decision-making to what Bruno Liebrucks called 'automated thinking'. In former times, it was believed that the divine intellect alone could comprehend a large totality at one glance. But nowadays, any AI user can feel like a voluntaristic deity, capable of commanding entire worlds of data at will. AI is especially appealing when thinking is hard work – as it is in education, and particularly at university. In subjects involving large amounts of text, using AI seems to offer a convenient shortcut. But this is only a seductive semblance. Cutting through this illusion requires a quite developed insight into the point of studying at all.

The central problem is that the use of AI in the academy poses a threat to independent thinking. It undermines the tension thinking needs for a critical engagement with science and represents the final closure of an attitude of consumption established well before it. Why exert oneself when the hard work can be outsourced? Yet this attitude is contrary to the idea of university education. Being a student means acquiring the current level of knowledge achieved in your chosen discipline, reflecting critically upon it and ultimately perhaps even extending it. All of this takes hard work. Hegel called it the 'sour labour of the concept'. AI evokes the seductive illusion that such labour is no longer necessary, but what in fact happens is that control is abandoned to automated thinking all too easily.