California’s university system went all in on AI, now it's tearing itself apart

75 pointsposted 17 hours ago
by jeffwass
(nytimes.com)

52 Comments

Reubend

an hour 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.

frereubu

42 minutes 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

39 minutes 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

33 minutes ago

While true, NYT took a clear turn towards clickbait headlines in the last 5-10 years. It used to have more self-respect.

kibwen

20 minutes ago

I don't discount that it's possible that NYT headline policy could have changed in the last decade, but sensationalism when it comes to newspaper headlines is the historical norm. "Clickbait" is an ancient phenomenon:

"In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens notes sensationalism can be found in the Ancient Roman gazette Acta Diurna, where official notices and announcements were presented daily on public message boards, the perceived content of which spread with enthusiasm in illiterate societies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism

Cyclone_

an hour ago

There has been quite a few articles in that paper where the headline is really designed to be clickbait.

chadash

15 minutes 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.

HDBaseT

4 minutes ago

You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~.

(not suggesting this is an effective or smart move).

justinator

10 minutes 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?)

tonymet

5 minutes 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.

noosphr

an hour 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.

mystraline

37 minutes ago

> spent $16.9 million on A.I.

Sooooo... A few days of claude code "thinking", for a few hundred people?

hparadiz

7 minutes ago

I use it in the field and my usage isn't even $1000 yet. I think I might be just now getting there after 6 months.

vermilingua

an hour ago

Yeah it’s not even noticeable that they’ve wasted the kind of money that could change the lives of hundreds of people, who even cares?

noosphr

44 minutes ago

Why not ask about the mismanagement of the other 60 billion?

qsxfthnkp2322

an hour ago

16.9M would have helped pay for quite a bit of student aid.

throwawaypath

an hour ago

Definitely. That amount could pay for 20 students to attend classes for a week!

pesus

37 minutes ago

I get the joke, but CSUs are fairly inexpensive as far as universities go. Tuition at SJSU is about $9500 per school year for California residents. That's a year of education for almost 1700 students. It may not seem like a much money to some, but it certainly covers a lot.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

38 minutes ago

They could buy, like, seven books from the bookstore!

dvt

an hour 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) 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

jltsiren

8 minutes ago

In real terms, tuition fees in public universities peaked in the early 2010s. They have not kept up with inflation since then. That explains a large part of the fiscal disaster.

irishcoffee

38 minutes 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

13 minutes 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.

mystraline

35 minutes ago

> These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA) 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.

There is a single person responsible for this.

His name is Reagan.

noosphr

21 minutes ago

It's been 40 years, surely someone could have done something to fix it if they wanted to.

AceJohnny2

an hour ago

Money is fungible. Budgets are not.

vondur

an hour 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

an hour 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

an hour 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"?

jwlake

4 minutes ago

Its also a teaching machine. There are several classes I had in college I would have killed for ChatGPT to cut through the terrible instruction.

wyager

20 minutes 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

10 minutes ago

That is a grotesque misuse of the phrase "a priori." What you mean is, "It's obvious to me." Ok, good for you.

AnimalMuppet

39 minutes 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.

pesus

an hour ago

There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.

ralph84

18 minutes ago

Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.

ashdksnndck

14 minutes ago

I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.

warkdarrior

an hour ago

> the Teacher's union is against AI

Well, of course. Horse buggy manufacturers and drivers were dead set against automobiles.

phyzome

34 minutes 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.

elicash

an hour 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... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.

harshreality

an hour 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

30 minutes 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.

dkarl

an hour 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

an hour ago

How does this work? Are you embracing AI and also against it? Are you protesting against your own use of AI?

epihelix

25 minutes 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.

ordersofmag

26 minutes 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

31 minutes 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.

Avicebron

an hour 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

an hour ago

That directly contradicts these companies' goals of eliminating all employees.

wr1276

42 minutes 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

“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

33 minutes ago

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