'I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff': professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning

Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one said. “Generative AI is the bane of my existence,” another wrote in an email. “I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) off a cliff.”

“I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” said Dora Zhang, a literature professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “What is it doing to us as a species?”

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Michael Clune, a literature professor and novelist, said that already, many students have been left “incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills”. In a recent essay, he warned that colleges and universities rushing to embrace the technology were preparing to “self-lobotomize”.

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Some caution that the humanities will survive – but as a province of the few. When he predicted the end of the humanities, Karp assured that there would be “more than enough jobs” for those with vocational training. Indeed, several professors spoke about concerns that AI will exacerbate a widening divide in US higher education and that small numbers of elite students will have access to a more traditional, largely tech-free liberal arts education, while everyone else has a “degraded, soulless form of vocational training administered by AI instructors”, said Zhang.

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Much more at the link.

Their opposition to AI is similar to that of most teachers I've met - with most of the exceptions to that opposition being teachers who have primarily become shills for AI companies, their job responsibilities emphasizing getting all students to use AI. These shills are often paid directly or indirectly by AI companies, with OpenAI in particular investing heavily in getting students to use their company's AI models.

I've always believed, and often said, that Sam Altman knew how much damage he would do to education when he released ChatGPT in late 2022. He knew students would be the users least able to spot all the errors the chatbot made. It was the gullible audience he wanted, the one most likely to spread hype about this handy free cheating tool. About a year ago a survey showed that students were still the largest group of ChatGPT users.

Of course there's a reason so many AI tools are offered for free.

As one of the professors the Guardian interviewed explains to his students, the companies are "hoping to addict" users and make them "helpless" without their AI tools.

And they're succeeding with a lot of people. Most of whom probably haven't heard of AI companies' hopes of raising subscriptions to hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. Both OpenAI and Perplexity's CEOs have talked of thousand-dollar-a-month subscriptions being something AI users should be willing to pay as they realize how much AI "helps" them.

They're counting on a lot more suckers than just one being born every minute.

They need those addicts, because they're all losing money now with even $200/month subscriptions. AI requires a lot of expensive compute, and all those new data centers with lots of polluting generators or the planned nuclear power plants built quickly with safety regulations slashed by the Trump regime aren't going to pay for themselves.

Good for those teachers taking a stand against students being turned into addicts.