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Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

nytimes.com

21–30 of 118 posts

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

#21
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]

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

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

#23
"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.

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

#24
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.

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.

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

#25
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.

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 interne…

> 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.

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

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

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.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

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

#28
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 d…

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.

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

#29
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.

> spent $16.9 million on A.I.

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

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.
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