8 ms·

Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

107 points by jeffwass 4mo ago

https://archive.ph/TNLUr https://archive.ph/TNLUr

dkarl 4mo ago
> Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it. I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.
- warkdarrior 4mo ago
  How does this work? Are you embracing AI and also against it? Are you protesting against your own use of AI?
  - ordersofmag 4mo ago
    It's like you're making the best you can of the current situation you find yourself in as an individual while also working toward changing the overall situation.
  - dwa3592 4mo ago
    a very good question. and yes, it's the protest against using AI while knowing if it doens't work out the way the protestor intended then they will fall behind. so the protestor wants everyone to stop and pay attention and think about what students and teachers are being asked to embrace, while they are also going ahead and using it because they know otherwise they'll hurt their chances at success if the tide doesn't subside. it's okay to be in multiple camps when things change fast. its a survival instinct.
  - epihelix 4mo ago
    Can't speak for the OP, but I find LLMs extremely useful in some work contexts, while also being horrified and appalled at how my Uni is trying to apply these tools ad nauseum on everything. So yes, both attitudes are simultaneously possible.
  - beej71 4mo ago
    You need to be clear on the usage. It's like how we're all pro-knife and anti-knife at the same time.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    Society would be better served if AI was eradicated tomorrow. But since that’s not going to happen it’s in everyone’s self interest to use AI as effectively as possible. It’s the world’s biggest Prisoner’s Dilemma.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Yes, that describes most of us right now.
noosphr 4mo ago
>California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos. So peanuts. The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion. This isn't even a rounding error.
- vermilingua 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - AceJohnny2 4mo ago
    Money is fungible. Budgets are not.
  - dvt 4mo ago
    The idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down. It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free. [1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png
    - irishcoffee 4mo ago
      Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. You pay for the rubber stamp.
      - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
        > Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment. Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others. Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that: - What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself. - Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.
Reubend 4mo ago
> A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart. The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.
- Cyclone_ 4mo ago
  There has been quite a few articles in that paper where the headline is really designed to be clickbait.
  - donohoe 4mo ago
    That was true 29, 40, 80 years ago
- frereubu 4mo ago
  If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. It happens here too, and its really annoying because often the article has a much more nuanced picture than the headline would have you believe. In an era when people do read the article after reading the headline it's somewhat forgivable - getting someone's attention then they get the nuance, but in the internet era when people just read the headline it's anachronistic.
  - kibwen 4mo ago
    > If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. This has been the case for essentially all newspapers since time immemorial. Reporters write the articles, editors write the headlines.
    - js2 4mo ago
      While true, NYT took a clear turn towards clickbait headlines in the last 5-10 years. It used to have more self-respect.
Avicebron 4mo ago
I feel like adding more internships with the companies like OpenAI, Oracle, etc would go a long way in improving outcomes and is probably even cheaper than donating licenses and compute.
- pesus 4mo ago
  That directly contradicts these companies' goals of eliminating all employees.
vondur 4mo ago
Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.
- wyager 4mo ago
  > Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. Is this a political coalition thing or is there a real teacher-related reason they don't like it?
  - b40d-48b2-979e 4mo ago
    Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?
    - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
      There are more aspects than "cheating machine" that could be bad for a college. It could be bad for students, and teachers may realize that.
    - wyager 4mo ago
      Yes the a priori most likely reason for the TU to be "against AI" is political. If you know much about TUs this is pretty obvious
      - throw4847285 4mo ago
        That is a grotesque misuse of the phrase "a priori." What you mean is, "It's obvious to me." Ok, good for you.
      - mold_aid 4mo ago
phyzome 4mo ago
A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.
harshreality 4mo ago
> The university now has an A.I. librarian Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.
- epihelix 4mo ago
  The need for physical libraries is fading anyway. I love books, and I spent many happy hours as a student (a long time ago) in the uni library, doing research the only way you could back then. But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article. And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.
  - goatlover 4mo ago
    Physical libraries still serve as a place students go to study. It's not about the books, it's having a designated quiet place along with meeting rooms and what not, in addition to computers and printers they can use.
    - TFNA 4mo ago
      Worth noting that some universities are giving up on the "quiet place" idea, perhaps because (like many public libraries) they think atomized society today desperately needs third places to socialize. I travel to many universities for conferences and see firsthand that talking is now allowed in some institutions' libraries, with only a small room made available for readers who need quiet.
  - TFNA 4mo ago
    "For STEM, at least" is doing a lot of work there. In fields like history, archaeology, and linguistics a lot of important research is only on paper. For the last decade, colleagues and I have been scanning publications and uploading them to the shadow libraries, but we have barely scratched the surface.
elicash 4mo ago
> In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same. This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson/ https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
wr1276 4mo ago
"This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar." Why is it always the same kind of intellectually challenged people who need custom avatars? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU “Our professors were pretty anti-A.I., and then C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI and things changed,” Ok, another corrupt university run by bribes.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
What is this chaos? The article doesn’t mention any of it, just some small insignificant amount spent of implementing it.
chadash 4mo ago
Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI. As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.
- justinator 4mo ago
  What is your confidence level that potential base level candidates can write a bubble sort function? (and is that at all important to you?)
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - chadash 4mo ago
    I don't care if they can write bubble sort off the top of their head. I do care that when they were in class, they had to go through the exercise of implementing bubble sort in their algorithm, realizing that they had an off-by-one error, identifying the problem, and fixing it. School is like working out at the gym, and AI is like bringing a forklift to the squat rack.
    - justinator 4mo ago
      Great metaphor.
- tonymet 4mo ago
  It’s not like we were building great quality products beforehand. Can we stop with the anti-AI sanctimony ? Some build great stuff, and some terrible, and software has predominantly been garbage for 15 years or more.
- HDBaseT 4mo ago
  You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~. (not suggesting this is an effective or smart move).
AAYALAG 4mo ago
[flagged]
beej71 4mo ago
I asked my students how they felt about having AI teacher avatars and they had a lot of negative things to say. The one thing that stood out the most to me was "it's disrespectful".
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
Actual title: A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It's Tearing Itself Apart.
BobbyTables2 4mo ago
Elementary and secondary schools are too content to use AI both for test question generation and grading of student responses… What are we even doing here?

107 points by jeffwass 4mo ago

https://archive.ph/TNLUr https://archive.ph/TNLUr

dkarl 4mo ago

> Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it. I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.

warkdarrior 4mo ago
How does this work? Are you embracing AI and also against it? Are you protesting against your own use of AI?
- ordersofmag 4mo ago
  It's like you're making the best you can of the current situation you find yourself in as an individual while also working toward changing the overall situation.
- dwa3592 4mo ago
  a very good question. and yes, it's the protest against using AI while knowing if it doens't work out the way the protestor intended then they will fall behind. so the protestor wants everyone to stop and pay attention and think about what students and teachers are being asked to embrace, while they are also going ahead and using it because they know otherwise they'll hurt their chances at success if the tide doesn't subside. it's okay to be in multiple camps when things change fast. its a survival instinct.
- epihelix 4mo ago
  Can't speak for the OP, but I find LLMs extremely useful in some work contexts, while also being horrified and appalled at how my Uni is trying to apply these tools ad nauseum on everything. So yes, both attitudes are simultaneously possible.
- beej71 4mo ago
  You need to be clear on the usage. It's like how we're all pro-knife and anti-knife at the same time.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Society would be better served if AI was eradicated tomorrow. But since that’s not going to happen it’s in everyone’s self interest to use AI as effectively as possible. It’s the world’s biggest Prisoner’s Dilemma.
jimbokun 4mo ago
Yes, that describes most of us right now.

noosphr 4mo ago

>California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos. So peanuts. The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion. This isn't even a rounding error.

vermilingua 4mo ago
[flagged]
- AceJohnny2 4mo ago
  Money is fungible. Budgets are not.
- dvt 4mo ago
  The idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down. It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free. [1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png
  - irishcoffee 4mo ago
    Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. You pay for the rubber stamp.
    - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
      > Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment. Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others. Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that: - What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself. - Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.

Reubend 4mo ago

> A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart. The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.

Cyclone_ 4mo ago
There has been quite a few articles in that paper where the headline is really designed to be clickbait.
- donohoe 4mo ago
  That was true 29, 40, 80 years ago
frereubu 4mo ago
If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. It happens here too, and its really annoying because often the article has a much more nuanced picture than the headline would have you believe. In an era when people do read the article after reading the headline it's somewhat forgivable - getting someone's attention then they get the nuance, but in the internet era when people just read the headline it's anachronistic.
- kibwen 4mo ago
  > If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. This has been the case for essentially all newspapers since time immemorial. Reporters write the articles, editors write the headlines.
  - js2 4mo ago
    While true, NYT took a clear turn towards clickbait headlines in the last 5-10 years. It used to have more self-respect.

Avicebron 4mo ago

I feel like adding more internships with the companies like OpenAI, Oracle, etc would go a long way in improving outcomes and is probably even cheaper than donating licenses and compute.

pesus 4mo ago
That directly contradicts these companies' goals of eliminating all employees.

vondur 4mo ago

Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.

wyager 4mo ago
> Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. Is this a political coalition thing or is there a real teacher-related reason they don't like it?
- b40d-48b2-979e 4mo ago
  Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?
  - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    There are more aspects than "cheating machine" that could be bad for a college. It could be bad for students, and teachers may realize that.
  - wyager 4mo ago
    Yes the a priori most likely reason for the TU to be "against AI" is political. If you know much about TUs this is pretty obvious
    - throw4847285 4mo ago
      That is a grotesque misuse of the phrase "a priori." What you mean is, "It's obvious to me." Ok, good for you.
    - mold_aid 4mo ago

phyzome 4mo ago

A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.

harshreality 4mo ago

> The university now has an A.I. librarian Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.

epihelix 4mo ago
The need for physical libraries is fading anyway. I love books, and I spent many happy hours as a student (a long time ago) in the uni library, doing research the only way you could back then. But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article. And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.
- goatlover 4mo ago
  Physical libraries still serve as a place students go to study. It's not about the books, it's having a designated quiet place along with meeting rooms and what not, in addition to computers and printers they can use.
  - TFNA 4mo ago
    Worth noting that some universities are giving up on the "quiet place" idea, perhaps because (like many public libraries) they think atomized society today desperately needs third places to socialize. I travel to many universities for conferences and see firsthand that talking is now allowed in some institutions' libraries, with only a small room made available for readers who need quiet.
- TFNA 4mo ago
  "For STEM, at least" is doing a lot of work there. In fields like history, archaeology, and linguistics a lot of important research is only on paper. For the last decade, colleagues and I have been scanning publications and uploading them to the shadow libraries, but we have barely scratched the surface.

elicash 4mo ago

> In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same. This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson/ https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

wr1276 4mo ago

"This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar." Why is it always the same kind of intellectually challenged people who need custom avatars? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU “Our professors were pretty anti-A.I., and then C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI and things changed,” Ok, another corrupt university run by bribes.

dyauspitr 4mo ago

What is this chaos? The article doesn’t mention any of it, just some small insignificant amount spent of implementing it.

chadash 4mo ago

Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI. As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.

justinator 4mo ago
What is your confidence level that potential base level candidates can write a bubble sort function? (and is that at all important to you?)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- chadash 4mo ago
  I don't care if they can write bubble sort off the top of their head. I do care that when they were in class, they had to go through the exercise of implementing bubble sort in their algorithm, realizing that they had an off-by-one error, identifying the problem, and fixing it. School is like working out at the gym, and AI is like bringing a forklift to the squat rack.
  - justinator 4mo ago
    Great metaphor.
tonymet 4mo ago
It’s not like we were building great quality products beforehand. Can we stop with the anti-AI sanctimony ? Some build great stuff, and some terrible, and software has predominantly been garbage for 15 years or more.
HDBaseT 4mo ago
You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~. (not suggesting this is an effective or smart move).

AAYALAG 4mo ago

[flagged]

beej71 4mo ago

I asked my students how they felt about having AI teacher avatars and they had a lot of negative things to say. The one thing that stood out the most to me was "it's disrespectful".

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

Actual title: A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It's Tearing Itself Apart.

BobbyTables2 4mo ago

Elementary and secondary schools are too content to use AI both for test question generation and grading of student responses… What are we even doing here?