Zombifying the universities

University of Chicago students study at the library, old-school style. Photo: Jean Lachat/Conde Nast

AI use on college campuses "threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons," writes Owen Yingling, a University of Chicago philosophy major, in The Great Zombification. "It will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training," he argues in The New Critic.

Elite universities are spending millions of dollars to figure out how to "integrate" AI in the classroom, Yingling writes. What it really means is substituting AI "for learning, teaching, and conversing."

Some will wait for the university system to crumble, hoping to build something new from the ashes, he writes. The ivied halls "will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent."

Yingling hopes it can be saved, however imperfect. "If schools took a harder line on AI — limiting pedagogical integration and cracking down on cheating — it would not solve any of the problems that stem from the tension (between training a mind for the workforce and the good life) that every real university grapples with," he writes. But, at least, students wouldn't be zombies.

Yes, it's a rant. I enjoyed it. Perhaps it's a bit over the top, but I don't see how universities will survive if students don't learn anything, because they offloaded the thinking to a chatbot, and they can't demonstrate any sort of work ethic, because they didn't do the work.