>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.

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?

Believe it or not, that other $60b isn’t one chunk of money, but other similar chunks of ~$20m that’s probably being spent in similarly idiotic ways. If this were an article about those, yes I probably would.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

>Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.

Why do you need equipment to learn something? You can learn the information outside of a lab.

>Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.

Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

> Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).

Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.

I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.

In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...

>it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds

Now imagine if AI can explain that page better so someone can understand it in a minute. This is why it is revolutionizing education.

> Now imagine if AI can explain that page better so someone can understand it in a minute.

The problem is the "understanding" part: from my experience oneself is the huge bottleneck here: one realizes very fast that the lacking component is one's own brain capacity.

This is also why many mathematicians and physicists are so obsessed about IQ: mathematics and physics are disciplines where IQ points really can give you quite an advantage.

So, the really helpful thing to ask to the AI for is not better explanations, but methods for getting a huge increase in brain capacity.

Because of all this, your point is rather a mixture between a nice science-fiction story and a marketing pitch for an AI company.

The information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)

Another example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.

> 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.

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.

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.

I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.

The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.

That would probably chap the hide of many a Texan.

Vanderbilt University opened a franchise somewhere in California recently. The politics aren't that different though so won't be too much of a shock

What exactly does it mean to be "against AI"? Like they don't want students to use AI in coursework? Or they don't want CSU administrators to spend money on commercial AI services? Or the Computer Science faculty don't want to teach about neural networks and linear algebra?

Sonoma-area rent (this college is in Rohnert Park, south of Santa Rosa and east of Sebastopol) spiked by a thousand dollars a month or more after the 2017 fires destroyed several square miles of homes, and the city planners chose to let the single-family home district rebuild as low density rather than rezoning the now-bulldozed land as medium or high density. That campus used to be packed before it became impossible to live in the area, but afaik rents never came back down through when I left a couple years ago, and I think? enrollment dropped off a cliff as the graduating classes discovered they couldn’t afford to get jobs in the area. Presumably losing a state college that specialized in medical professionals in the city next door was worth it to Santa Rosa to preserve those atomic family homes, but locals were livid and it was the beginning of the end for me there (or else I would have been one of those students enrolled these past two years).

I don't think you can just appropriate the property that burned down and then build high density housing. I'd imagine the people probably want to rebuild their homes and move back. There's probably other land that can be used for more high density housing.

I’m usually pretty YIMBY, but I would make an exception for a place that just had a catastrophic wildfire. (That is, unless something’s been done to lower the wildfire risk.)

What I mean is, it seems like people should moving away from places with high wildfire risk? If so, building more housing as YIMBY encourages is counterproductive. Instead, they should disallow building there.

There are similar arguments about building housing in a flood zone.

Instead, we should be building more housing in safer places.

As it turns out, insurers agree on the risk under today’s management practices and are simply ending service to the entire state rather than be compelled to insure the people living in unmanaged forest zones (i.e. all of western and northern California).

In that specific area of Santa Rosa, now that it’s burned it won’t burn like that again for a few decades — it’s not like SoCal LA where it goes up every ten years like clockwork due to chaparral — and it turned out that no one had been enforcing “safe distance around home clear of brush and trees” and so it’s probably now the lowest wildfire risk city in the entire state to build homes in as a result: proper code enforcement, safety protocols, and a case study of how fire spreads through blown embers, dry roofs, wall-adjacent bushes, and open vents.

The fires reached all the way to the highway and very nearly jumped it to burn towards the ocean and they were prepared to sacrifice the entire eastern half of the city to prevent that, because Marin and Sevastopol refuse to thin their trees and it would have spread in a single day to all of North Bay if they let it cross. (And, yes, even Marin deserves not to be razed by fire, however much ire they’ve earned!) So it turns out that building homes near any forest is a bad idea if you’re not also thinning out the forest with selective logging, and as a result the entirety of Northern California and Western Oregon are more or less ‘places with high wildfire risk’. It doesn’t have to be that way, but certainly it will be until leaders grow a spine and stop capitulating to the existing homeowners.

I wrote a rather detailed paper about this with a dozen references spanning the past century for school last year; no AI required, just a handful of luxurious 2500-word days and then an couple more for editing. Best week of the year. Each wildfire costs $100-150M of California GDP in direct and indirect impacts; at $15k/yr fulltime minimum wage, hiring a thousand laborers to carry hand axes into the forest and thin them for a full year — machines can’t traverse and even if they could, machine logging and controlled burns can only happen during 4 months out of 12 — would prevent at least one wildfire (breakeven point) and every one prevented after that would be pure profit for the state economy. You’d think greed would drive them to do it, but apparently it’s anathema to suggest manual labor can solve problems anymore. Maybe someday Santa Rosa or Sonoma County will work up the courage to do it :)

Where are the safer places? Pretty much everywhere habitable in California is at high risk of wildfires and/or earthquakes (plus floods in the Delta region). Instead of placing certain areas off limits a better solution is defensible space and stricter building codes. For example, build metal roofs.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/home-hardening

If they're all the same, why are there fire risk maps for California showing some places to be riskier than others?

Anywhere that’s burned recently or doesn’t have dense trees near housing is lower risk. Not all of California is woodland, etc.

> 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?

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"?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I guess I should qualify that, many professors are ambivalent regarding AI, but some view it as an existential threat to their profession. Most here are scrambling to figure out ways to work around it if not incorporate some AI into the curriculum, since every student has access to ChapGPT and many also have access to CoPilot.

Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.

As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.

> It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.

No, but that would make it a "political coalition thing", which is why I asked

Dismissing opinions you don't like by arbitrarily classifying them as "political" vs "not political" is lazy and dishonest.

> the Teacher's union is against AI

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

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.

I heard they do CS exams on air-gapped machines at UC Berkley. Use of AI to do CS homework is strongly discouraged, and if someone cheated, it shows up at the exam...

I guess if I were in school today, I would be accused of using AI on my homework, as I did very well on all of my projects and bombed my tests. My professors all recognized my hard work and gave me good grades, but I feel like that wouldn't go the same way today.

You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~.

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

Well seems like this is de facto the way companies are hiring right now. Unemployment for new grads is much higher than for people who have been in the industry for a while.

What is your confidence level that potential base level candidates can write a bubble sort function? (and is that at all important to you?)

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.

Do scores on proctored exams have any correlation with job performance? Employers mostly care about ability to complete projects on time and get along with colleagues. How do you put that on an exam?

For basic courses yes. Anything graduate level usually involves papers that take weeks or months of work.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

You're fooling yourself if you think newspapers and news media in general haven't always been about attention-baiting.

Sure, if it bleeds it leads. But I've been a news consumer since the 1980s and a reader of the NYT almost as long as it's had a web site. It is my strong impression that its headlines have gotten noticeably worse. The main one that annoys me, and I don't actually see an example of it on the main page right now, is the teaser headline that forces you to click through to know what the article is even about[^1].

Edit: here's an example. Headline on the front page is "A Chaotic, Confusing Campaign: Here’s Who Should Be the Next Governor of California". Makes it sound like you're clicking through to an endorsement, right? Nope, the article is actually a voter guide. It's a completely misleading headline.

[^1]: You can often inspect the URL to see the original descriptive headline before the clickbaiters got to it which makes it even more annoying.

Blame the economics of the Internet. Companies use clickbait because it works, there have been many examples of this, and if a company wants to stay revenue generating in this day and age it must use clickbait.

At the NYT? I don’t doubt AI is used in figuring out headlines but ultimately a human makes the decision.

Quite funny to think that we might have AI models meticulously nudging newspaper editors in order to carefully control the public's Overton Window about AI, playing some 5d chess.

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

Yeah that title is absurd, tho it did make me read the whole thing out of pure incredulity. The “tearing itself apart” apparently refers to the fact that the CSU system spent $16M on AI tools during a $2B+ budget deficit, which… yeah. Doesn’t take an economics professor to see the problem with that thesis!

The author does seem interested in supporting the headline, but I think they're too good of a journalist to pull off the outrage. It mainly comes through in passages like this:

  After I pointed out to Janos that Marx himself would have had a field day with MarxGPT, he laughed… by interacting with ChatGPT, he and his students solidified its role in the public education ecosystem; and their ability to do so was the result of the transfer of almost $17 million of worker-generated public funds to a private, for-profit company. 

If this wasn’t the NYT, I’d assume this was a joke. Sadly, I think it is indeed intended as something of a slam dunk…

They do get to AI critics eventually, though obviously ‘activists dislike X’ isn’t really proof for ‘X is tearing us apart[, Lisa!]’. Namely,

  “We feel like a guinea pig for what A.I. is going to do to higher education,” Kenney said. The embrace of generative A.I., she went on, is “a step down the path of creating a really different kind of future citizen and worker.” This kind of student would be intellectually passive, less likely to see themselves as agents of their own lives.

I think everyone would agree they’re “guinea pigs”, as are we all in a way — such is the curse of living in interesting times. The rest seems pretty plainly speculative, though.

  This winter, the [critics at SFSU] circulated a petition asking the chancellor’s office to invest in protecting faculty jobs and academic programs rather than renew the OpenAI contract.

…hopefully an economics professor chimes in!

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".

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

You need to be clear on the usage. It's like how we're all pro-knife and anti-knife at the same time.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

> 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.

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.

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

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?