AI, eh?

I have been reading a lot lately about various post-secondary education institutions putting in specific courses or sets of courses in which the use of AI by students is forbidden. I wonder about the possibility of enforcing such rules, but I write here about something closer to home.

The good old Fraser Institute sent out a survey to Grade 6-12 teachers across Canada about the use of AI. Those teachers were in particular asked about their students’ use of AI. FI did not survey the students themselves, probably wisely. You can read the entire report of their survey results here if you like, no paywall. So far as I can tell, the folks at FI used the usual methods to obtain a sample of over 750 teachers around the country. I am not expert on that sort of thing, I will just repeat that there is always a legitimate question as to whether the results of any voluntary survey are representative of what you would get from surveying every teacher in the country.

Here is one finding from said survey:

Nearly all teachers (95.6%) surveyed believe at least some of their students use AI for homework, and 42.2% believe more than half do. Of those students perceived to use AI, teachers believe that more than half (55.9%) use it to do their work for them.

As worthwhile as it may be to know what teachers believe regarding AI use by their own students, here are the results from the survey I find most interesting.

A majority of teachers polled (67.7%) are using AI to assist in their teaching, and 68.4% of those teachers are using it frequently (at least weekly).

You can be sure, and a few still-working faculty I have spoken to recently have told me as much, that instructors at every level in the educational system are using AI a lot to make putting together and teaching their courses easier.

This is what AI does, why it’s use will continue and increase: it makes writing and organizing and research easier, less time consuming. That plus human nature means that instructors at all levels will use it, and use it more as time goes on, and why any moves to limit the use of AI by students are surely doomed to collapse from the weight of sheer hypocrisy.

I will add that it may also be why post-secondary education will collapse, finally, from its own implausibility.  I have a longer post brewing on that Very Big topic, but the bottom line is pretty much this –

There is almost nothing that PSE students are currently asked to do in their classes that AI cannot do for them, to at least a mediocre level of quality. Given that the goal of the vast majority of PSE students today is precisely to ‘get through it’, to get that degree to allow them to get that good job, how can PSE not become a pure festival of AI? All the instructors will use it to set up their courses, and then use it to mark the work that the students use AI to do for them. Faculty can also have AI write and submit any reference letters that are requested by any student’s AI chatbot.

At that point, it seems to me it will be impossible to maintain the fiction that all this is worth paying some $40k and four years of one’s time, or in the US, maybe $400k over four years.

The only problem remaining will be what to do with all those buildings and parking lots.