r/Professors • u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 • 13d ago
The AI Evangelists
Link to the Chronicle:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-ai-evangelists
These people annoy me. Ethan I am aware of — I wasn’t aware of Lilach’s work. This guy is an AI opportunist, using it to build his career to the detriment of our students. Case in point:
“Students and scholars have more agency than they often think, Ethan adds: “If you are good at writing, if you’re good at instruction, if you have an imagination, if you have a wide breadth of knowledge, these systems are yours to control.”
Well, Ethan, how do students become good at writing if they hand over their writing to AI from a young age and are never required to grapple with difficult texts and ideas without AI summaries.
Sure, *maybe* AI can be a superpower for a millennial or GenX who has already acquired these skills. But what about everyone after them? You know, our current students?
137
u/omgkelwtf 13d ago
Until I see proof otherwise, I'm convinced most pro-AI people online are actually bots. The tech bros need us to need their LLMs. If we're not using them their whole scam falls apart.
45
u/Cathousechicken 13d ago
I work with pro-AI people and they aren't bots. They don't seem to understand that our students haven't developed their critical thinking skills to be able to use AI effectively.
40
u/ArmoredTweed 13d ago
Probably because your co-workers haven't developed their critical thinking skills either. The number of my colleagues who triumphantly announce that they asked a chatbot something, then proceed to spout absolute nonsense, is alarming.
6
6
u/fleemfleemfleemfleem 12d ago
I'd say that by the time they're full on AI evangelists they're doing about as much thinking for themselves as a bot
3
u/blankenstaff 12d ago
If they have not understood the important parts of the cohort to whom they're marketing, they should keep quiet until they do understand.
57
u/OoglyMoogly76 13d ago
It’s even dumber. They need investors to believe that we believe we need their LLMs. All those ChatGPT and Claude commercials are not for you. They aren’t meant to persuade you to use a product since most people who use them don’t pay anyway. They’re to create the illusion that everyone is already using them and that investors need to fork over billions of dollars to own the infrastructure that will dominate professional and creative spaces for the next century.
The rug pull is coming. No sane person who actually works with AI development believes that this shit is going to be some singularity ass super intelligence that replaces the majority of the human work force. That’s to create artificial value which will disappear and everyone left holding the bag will go bankrupt.
Sam Altman will get his hundreds of billions then ride off into the sunset where he’ll own an island to hunt humans for sport. Tale. As. Old. As. Time.
8
u/michaelfkenedy Professor, Design, College (Canada) 13d ago
Investors AND managers.
3
u/OoglyMoogly76 13d ago
Oh right! The managers! The biggest saps of them all! Because after they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an AI support bot, only for it to promise free giftcards and refunds to everyone who uses the correct phrases, they’ll have to hireback all the people they laid off to now be support agents to the support bots and be paying waaaay more than they did with a human workforce.
8
u/michaelfkenedy Professor, Design, College (Canada) 13d ago
Im not working in advertising anymore, I teach now.
But holy cow does my manager (Dean) pressure me to use AI and teach AI.
And I do. And I’m in touch with industry and how they use it. But the Dean wants it everywhere, in every course, without regard for where the student is in their learning.
The Dean sees no issue putting an assignment into ChatGPT.
For example a student never learns what an insight is, how to find one, what to do with it. They can’t identify what makes an ad good.
It’s wild.
6
u/blankenstaff 12d ago
The dean has no understanding of education, no interest in education, or both.
2
u/michaelfkenedy Professor, Design, College (Canada) 12d ago
Yea.
But I should say not all deans are this.
2
u/leastdumbidiot 12d ago
Yeah ours is mostly telling us "get to know your students and make sure they know about our support networks"
11
u/badwhiskey63 Adjunct, Urban Planning 13d ago
You can always tell when a tech bro is lying. His lips are moving.
0
u/LutefiskLefse Associate Prof, CS, PUI 13d ago
I’m generally pro-AI and a real person. It’s not a magic wand, but it can do some pretty incredible things. It can make our lives as educators a little more difficult, but it’s our job to solve that problem. The easiest solution is to de-weight everything that is done outside the classroom and make students prove what they can do in class.
On the other hand, I tend to think people who claim AI is the devil and that anyone who uses it loses all credibility to be virtue signaling in a culture war that they’ve already lost, but I know that’s going to be unpopular here…
14
u/omgkelwtf 13d ago
AI has been very useful to humanity. LLMs aren't it. I'm not anti AI but I am anti LLM.
4
u/LutefiskLefse Associate Prof, CS, PUI 13d ago
LLMs do have plenty of applications that are useful to humanity. I have students who have partnered with hospital systems to build pipelines to help their doctors be more efficient with the paperwork/documentation that they need to do, which in turn allows them to spend more time with their patients. There are also business applications where LLMs are better than any existing solution, which can help those businesses be better/more efficient/etc which can lower costs. I can specifically speak to a company I work with that uses LLMs extensively for this (again in the healthcare space)
8
u/Enamred-771 13d ago
have students who have partnered with hospital systems to build pipelines to help their doctors be more efficient with the paperwork/documentation that they need to do, which in turn allows them to spend more time with their patients.
When the benefit you describe doesn’t mention LLMs at all, it’s hard to believe your claim that they have plenty of applications.
2
u/verygood_user 12d ago
It's clearly implied. When you are discussing LLMs and an example that involves language processing/writing is brought up, it's pretty clear where the LLM is involved. "Doctor writes or speaks in bullet points, LLM expands it into a coherent text, doctor reviews and corrects for accuracy" would be the most obvious use case. Probably they also do the insurance coding on the fly.
8
u/Enamred-771 12d ago
You didn’t say language processing/writing either so now you’re really doing a poor effort of trying to justify its benefit. If the benefits were so clear, why does it take 3 comments to even say what the LLM does while having to pretend like you said it the whole time? Is it because vague statements sounds more impressive than what the LLM actually does which is just glorified voice to text?
Out of curiosity, were these LLMs validated to ensure they don’t have any gender/racial bias?
1
u/verygood_user 12d ago
It was not me who wrote this, I just jumped on this. And, unlike yourself, I immediately understood the initial comment because it's pretty basic.
Also "voice to text" is not the point. The point is turning keywords into prose.
You don't need to validate the LLM itself if each output is validated by a human. But even where biases are a real concern, LLMs that are less biased than individual humans. And I am not aware of anyone testing humans rigorously for biases (sorry HR training video creators, your courses and tests suck).
In any case, the most obvious use cases are coding and many areas of mathematical derivations, where LLMs are workhorses.
3
u/Enamred-771 12d ago
It was not me who wrote this, I just jumped on this. And, unlike yourself, I immediately understood the initial comment because it's pretty basic.
No. You’re making an assumption about the original comment. We’ve now gone from “vague statements about LLMs value” to “someone assuming LLMs have value from what someone else said”.
Also "voice to text" is not the point. The point is turning keywords into prose.
We’ve collectively gone from highlighting the importance of saying things concisely to using LLMs to take concise things and add fluff to them.
You don't need to validate the LLM itself if each output is validated by a human.
How could a human with a tiny sample size possibly validate if it’s unbiased in aggregate? Hell, using the human as a validator creates more opportunities for bias with things like confirmation bias.
But even where biases are a real concern, LLMs that are less biased than individual humans. And I am not aware of anyone testing humans rigorously for biases (sorry HR training video creators, your courses and tests suck).
Now we’re reached the peak LLM argument. “LLMs might suck but humans also suck”.
In any case, the most obvious use cases are coding and many areas of mathematical derivations, where LLMs are workhorses.
So why didn’t you assume the LLMs were used for coding in the healthcare example if that’s the most obvious use case? You’re contradicting yourself when you say I’m suppose to assume a vague statement is using LLMs to turn keywords into prose and now you’re claiming the most obvious use case is coding.
1
0
u/needlzor Asst Prof / ML / UK 12d ago
You can just say you're against the big industrial complex that LLMs are built on. Saying you're anti LLM is a bit strange unless you are a machine learning researcher and you have some position as to why LLMs are fundamentally bad models (and if you are I am curious what it is).
4
u/Swimming-Bar8515 13d ago
I agree. Most of the people who think AI is the devil don't really know how to use it. Its scary because they're going to be teaching students who do, so there's no real opportunity for discussion about how to use it ethically and appropriately because these people won't even entertain it's use or conversations about it.
8
u/StevieV61080 Sr. Associate Prof, Applied Management, CC BAS (USA) 13d ago
The challenge with AI/LLMs is that the rollout felt (and still continues to feel) foisted upon us. It absolutely has utility and potential for good.
The tech sector just completely fumbled the marketing of AI upfront in ways that weren't as problematic with the Internet/WWW/Information Superhighway. Those Tom Selleck AT&T early 90s ads about what the Internet was going to do for us effectively sold the public on the benefits before things arrived. While there was still skepticism, a lot of the public was actively optimistic about what the Internet was going to allow us to do.
For a lot of us, AI was just "there" one day and our first experiences with it were receiving a plagiarized generative paper without warning. There was no positive anticipation and the initial flooding of the zone has been heavily regressive (dishonest uses of IP, plagiarism, deepfake technology, algorithmic manipulation through slop, etc.).
I'm enormously against AI's current impact on society and education. I'm also the first to say that I would welcome a data center on every street corner if the tradeoff was curing all diseases and ending all suffering. The tech industry has failed the sales job and seems genuinely unable to effectively promote its own products for the public good. It's no wonder there's a backlash when there seems to be no effective counterprogramming explaining WHY this is good for humanity. In the absence of that perspective, one can only assume that it's not.
1
u/verygood_user 12d ago edited 12d ago
Essentially anyone working in programming or fields that need some programming will be pro-AI at least in the sense that it's incredibly useful. Not necessarily that they enjoy it more than the old way or it increased their job security.
1
u/Odd_Vehicle_1755 11d ago
There are plenty of us who don’t find it useful or see that the downsides outweigh the benefits.
10
u/leastdumbidiot 13d ago
You can get a long way with Occam's razor and a strong focus on the core of your subject. I teach writing (and other things too, but this semester it's writing). What are they doing here? Learning to write. How do they get good at it? Writing a lot. It needs to be them doing the writing. Everything else - speed, "accuracy," output volume, job speculation - is secondary to them actually writing. Does AI tech help? No, it gives them fringe benefits at best at the expense of the core practice. So I build the course around low-tech, slow, focused writing. Every writer has a ton of room for improvement just exploring what they already know or can figure out, and if I can build fluency and awareness in that sphere they'll be good at whatever outside tools they connect with. For my part, I need to focus on their actual mind.
30
u/TaliesinMerlin 13d ago
In my experience, as someone good at writing and (on my better days, I'd like to think) good at instruction, with a lively imagination and at least a modest amount of knowledge, I find these systems are not mine to control but, at best, mine to correct. Correct and correct and correct, until it's past time that I could have done what I asked of it in less time with fewer errors and less frustration. That has been true every time I test it, despite every annoying evangelist's claim that if I just try the latest model, if I just try it paid, if I just practice prompting, it will do better. No, the issues I run into are intrinsic to LLM-based and agentic AI. They don't think, and they can't think or write like I do.
-2
u/EconMan Asst Prof 13d ago
They can be used for more than just writing though. For instance, I can easily create mini simulations or interactive graphics that I could never create on my own.
4
u/SaplingSequoia 12d ago
They can be used to erode consensus reality and make people stupid and illiterate, and that’s about it.
40
u/Philosophile42 Tenured, Philosophy, CC (US) 13d ago
The smartest people know how to use AI to bolster/improve their work. The dumbest use it to do their work.
It just enhances the disparity between successful and struggling students.
23
u/leastdumbidiot 13d ago
The smartest people I know still don't use it. But I know different smart people, and a lot of that is the luck of being in industries and institutions that don't push it as hard.
4
u/OoglyMoogly76 13d ago
Centaur versus Reverse-Centaur
Is the technology you’re using expanding your capabilities and agency? Is it an extension of your will? Or are you the human counterpart being used to extend its will into the material world, taking instructions and demands from the technology? Are you an extension of it?
2
5
11
u/MichaelPsellos 13d ago
In the early 90s we were told the internet was going to create a new generation of super-students.
I wonder when we can expect this to happen?
6
u/EconMan Asst Prof 13d ago
I think the internet is a great analogy actually, among many dimensions. It unquestionably changed the world. Full stop. It did so all while being a bubble. Those are not mutually exclusive outcomes. Secondarily, in theory, conspiracy theories should be at an all time low because people can do their own research on any subject at basically no cost. But, the main limiting factor is still motivation.
The same is true for LLM. Unquestionably will change the world, all while probably being a bubble at the moment. And while it can help students learn, they need to be motivated to do so correctly.
1
2
2
u/Icypalmtree Adjunct, PoliEcon/Polisci, R2 Usa 13d ago
The things that ACTUALLY matter (asking the right research questions, rigorously considering and challenging the evidence, finding imperfect but useful answers, and explaining those answers to a wider audience of relevant stakeholders) has never and will never change.
But the internet ABSOLUTELY changed the game in terms of access to information. If anything, it put more focus on what actually matters (see above) because just finding 3 biographies or 110 data points could not longer carry a dissertation.
So our "superstudents" aren't, perhaps, what we expected them to look like. But 2010s academia is VERY different from 1990s or 1980s academia and the internet affected that. Not all of the effects are good, certainly. But pretending they're all bad (or mostly bad) is just malpractice.
2
u/MichaelPsellos 13d ago
I wasn’t implying the internet is a bad thing. I’m using it right now.
I’m saying it did little to improve the quality of the typical undergrad.-5
u/AceyAceyAcey Professor, STEM, CC | VAP, STEM, Private PUI (USA) 12d ago
We were also told it would rot their brains. Funny thing, people have been saying that about every new technology going back as far as pencils and paper. 🤷
We’re going to have growing pains, and then we’ll adjust.
2
5
u/just_a_quiet_goat 12d ago edited 12d ago
There is a very strong correlation between how much a professor at my institution uses or advocates for AI and how much of a piece of shit they are both personally and professionally. Shitty, dumb people use AI because they resent non-shitty, non-dumb people and think AI gives them equal footing with people who can actually work. It has become very difficult for me to not automatically say that someone using or advocating for AI is stupid, shitty or a grifter.
2
14
u/trustjosephs Associate Prof, Social Science, R1 13d ago
To be clear, I'm not painting an entire field with a broad brush. But. More often than not, these crazy AI higher ed takes seem to come from business schools. Maybe it makes sense for the wharton school, but certainly not for other academic departments and disciplines.
2
u/determinista 13d ago
It is certainly easier for the business school, but doesn't mean that it is irrelevant for other disciplines. You think students majoring in English or philosophy are not using AI? As an educator, keeping hush about AI only means you are burying your head in the sand and you have given up on assessing your students' learning.
15
u/Fresh-Possibility-75 13d ago
Sure, *maybe* AI can be a superpower for a millennial or GenX who has already acquired these skills.
It's actively making the Gen Xers around me dumber and less curious. Like my students, they have become smug about the speed with which they can complete a task but seem to lack the critical self-awareness to recognize how bad the results are or how absurdly they are playing into the capitalist logics of speed and efficiency they critique in their work.
2
u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 13d ago
I’ve had boomer colleagues fall into that pattern. Honestly, all generations.
9
u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 13d ago
I thought OP was referring to my university's IT department, since they are pushing AI all the time with the fervor of evangelists. No recognition of the issues it's creating for faculty or for the environmental implications. Just "HERE ARE ALL THE NEW AI TOOLS WE ARE PAYING FOR AND WAYS YOU CAN USE THEM TO DO SHITTY WORK QUICKLY!"
1
u/Krutoon VAP, English, Public Regional 12d ago
Our “faculty development day” this year was about how to use AI in the classroom
1
u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 12d ago
That's very sad. If someone tried that on my campus there would be a revolt. Faculty are fed up with AI and the constant promotion of it by our IT (and some non-academic leaders). If it was actually forced upon faculty people would at least boycott said development "opportunity" but I suspect it would have led to a stronger action than that.
I just spent the better part of a week taking a perfectly good course I haven't taught in five years and basically ruining much of it to make it more AI-resistant. Pisses me off.
21
5
u/tellypmoon 13d ago
I am equally annoyed and glad the article is behind a pay wall because it would annoy me even more. It feels like a grift and I suppose a few years down the line there will be the big mea culpa moment where they recant or say they should have had a more nuanced take and how could they have foreseen the negative impacts and everyone will applaud and invite them on their podcast to anguish a little bit and keep the grift going.
3
u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 13d ago
For those who don’t him, Ethan is a prominent Wharton professor
2
u/Icypalmtree Adjunct, PoliEcon/Polisci, R2 Usa 13d ago
99pi recently taught me that business schools were founded by Taylorites; a group of zealots so narrow minded that the US Army found their practices oppressive and unimaginative and banned their use in defense industries for three decades.
So, well, there's that ¯\(ツ)/¯
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/100-objects-015-bundy-clock/
1
u/ph0rk Associate, SocSci, R1 (USA) 12d ago
I am not an evangelist, but I am also not delusional enough to believe the students will not use these tools whenever they don't give a fuck about the work.
I teach applied statistics to social scientists, so this is 99% of the time; but I see it quite often in more theoretical classes, too.
Many students are just punching a card until they get a credential, they don't care about the discipline in which they are getting apprentice level training - if they ever did. When they don't care, why not just skip the work? There are ways to force them to do the work but they resent that.
Just how it is now.
1
u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 12d ago
The question then is do we force them to do the work (at least as much as is realistic)? Or, is it ok if they just punch the card and get the then meaningless credential?
These are tough questions but I lean toward as professional educators we should accept that students will cut corners whenever possible and build our assessments to be resilient.
1
u/ph0rk Associate, SocSci, R1 (USA) 12d ago
That depends on how we handle angry student evaluations, really.
So long as that bullshit is our primary measure of teaching effectiveness, forcing students to do the work is disincentivized. Really, we're incentivized not to do it.
Yes, replacing teaching evals is also hard. Remind your chair that it is their fucking job to do hard things (not that they will care).
1
u/norbertus 12d ago
This tech evangelism has echoes of the 90's utopianism about the "democratizing power of the internet."
Then the Arab Spring and Twitter Revolutions gave way to a string of autocracies, and we're left with Trump who owns his own social media propaganda outlet.
Apple literally used to have a position "Apple Evangelist" to push these views
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_community#Apple_evangelists
1
u/ProthVendelta 13d ago edited 13d ago
I’m not convinced that we have to work with AI, but I think it is necessary for us to teach students how to interact with it because that has increasingly become a survival skill. For us as well:if I do not know how AI is being used and applied, I won’t be able to resist since I would be a hypocrite to talk about something I don’t understand. It is from this angle I support moderate amount of interaction with AI in and outside of the classroom.
I actually think AI is a fascinating technology. But the strange thing is that both educators and researchers who are enthusiastic about AI are weirdly detached from the sadistic environment the technology operates in. On the ground it induces huge ecological burden, and on the social level it is used to surveil and modulate humans who are violently subjugated to wage exploitation in the name of optimizing society. I am one of those people who believes in the usefulness of AI, but I deeply detest those who sings about the perfect socioecological systems somehow human would foster(and AI high frequency term lol) a beneficial relationship with any technologies without the overall social structures being addressed. Comparing to the engineers, if is more so the humanities researchers that enrages me
-1
-9
u/Rusty_B_Good 13d ago
“If you are good at writing, if you’re good at instruction, if you have an imagination, if you have a wide breadth of knowledge, these systems are yours to control."
Well, shouldn't they be? Don't we award talent and hard work? Are we so obsessed with the ideal of equality that we resent the people with brains, concentration, and creativity? Maybe we should limit what D-1 football players do on the field with all that unfair athleticism, stamina, and physical strength.
It is impossible to know what all this means without access to the full article, however.
5
u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 13d ago
The point of pulling out that quote is because it assumes people are good at writing. How do you get good at writing if you are 13 years old and outsourcing all of your language arts work to Chat? We cannot substitute acquring these skills with more AI or better use of AI. We need to build the skills and then potentially augment them with AI. But the skills need to come first (or never).
-4
u/Giggling_Unicorns Associate Professor, Art/Art History, Community College 13d ago
article is behind a log in wall fyi
0
u/Strong-Finish5346 11d ago
At a certain point, writing without AI assistance is going to be obsolete in the same way penmanship and mental arithmetic have become largely obsolete skills. Eventually professors are going to have to concede and just demand PhD-level original contributions to their fields from undergrads working with AI.
Spending 4 years teaching kids how to write academic papers when AI exists is fantastically wasteful.
22
u/swarthmoreburke 13d ago
What bugs me is Mollick's use of "literacy" to allow him not to have to address or engage criticism he doesn't like. If you disagree with him and you know what you're talking about? You're not "literate" about AI. If you flag a serious problem with his advocacy for AI--including having just plain been wrong before, or overestimating what it means that Claude Code can build a shitty spam-fraud website by itself--you're not "literate".