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Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

nytimes.com

11–20 of 118 posts

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#11
post #2

>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.

[flagged]

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

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#12
post #9
post #7

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.

> 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"?

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#13
post #7

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.

> the Teacher's union is against AI

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

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#14
> 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.

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#15
post #3

> 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.

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

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#16
> 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.

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#17
post #4

> 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.

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

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#18
post #9
post #7

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.

> 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?

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.

Re: Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

#19

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.

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