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AI Education United States

'Welcome to Campus. Here's Your ChatGPT.' (nytimes.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the school-daze dept.
The New York Times reports: California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future A.I.-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest A.I.-empowered university system..." Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT.
And other U.S. campuses including the University of Maryland are also "working to make A.I. tools part of students' everyday experiences," according to the article. It's all part of an OpenAI initiative "to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life."

The Times calls it "a national experiment on millions of students." If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "A.I.-native universities..." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium A.I. services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT...

OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where A.I. is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide A.I. tools and training...

[Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education] said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the A.I. "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Ms. Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their A.I. chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life.

"It would be their gateway to learning — and career life thereafter," Ms. Belsky said.
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'Welcome to Campus. Here's Your ChatGPT.' More

'Welcome to Campus. Here's Your ChatGPT.'

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  • Foolishness. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @12:48PM (#65435963)

    AI development is only just starting. Anything learned about AI is going to be worthless by the time they graduate. Besides that, why would they learn anything when they can simply rely on AI to give them the answer? You give a calculator to a child who is just learning math because they'll only ever learn to punch in numbers to a magic answer machine.

    This will not produce valuable workers nor will it provide an education. This is foolishness.

    • Re:Foolishness. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:51PM (#65436075)

      This is not about that. This is about every student having a personal tutor, specifically designed for educational purposes. Khan academy on steroids.

      Will every student use it to actually learn things? No. Will it be far more productive than unsuccessfully trying to ban these tools. Yes.

      The genie is out of the bottle, people. Adapt or die.

      • Will it be far more productive than unsuccessfully trying to ban these tools. Yes.

        You say that with the confidence of a chat bot even though at best this is a wild guess.

        • No, it's very clear that trying to ban the tools is going to be completely unsuccessful and if it's also clear that having a personal tutor can immensely increase the rate of learning. It is thus very far from a 'wild guess', so keep your stupid ad hominems to yourself.

          • That's not at all clear. We're not talking about a knowledgeable personal tutor here, but a next token predictor optimised on stringing together sentences that the user is most likely to believe is an actual answer to their question. Their potential to be counterproductive is about as big as to be helpful.

            Also, pointing out that something is conjecture isn't an ad hominem.

            • You say that with the confidence of a chat bot

              is a thinly veiled attack at me and AI assistants, each by themselves constituting an ad hominem. Chat bot is pejorative.

              We're not talking about a knowledgeable personal tutor here but a next token predictor optimised on stringing together sentences that the user is most likely to believe is an actual answer to their question

              Again a massive understatement of what AI assistants can currently do. You can say that it is just a stochastic parrot or whatever negative description you can come up with as often as you want, but it doesn't change the billions and billions of times AI assistants have already provided knowledge and insight and continue to do so. It doesn't change the fact that AI assistants already perf

      • This is not about that. This is about every student having a personal tutor, ...

        This is about every STEM student being free to sell their books, they won't need them as references. The AI can fetch the details you would otherwise look up in a book. Well, if the book was paper and not a short term digital subscription. :-)

      • This is not about that. This is about every student having a personal tutor, specifically designed for educational purposes. Khan academy on steroids.

        Except sometimes it gives the wrong answer and bad info because it doesn't actually know anything being that it is a mere LLM.

        Will it be far more productive than unsuccessfully trying to ban these tools. Yes.

        Based on what evidence?

        The genie is out of the bottle, people. Adapt or die.

        You're not wrong but this seems more like a suicide pact.

        • You seem to think that it would be hard to use the base level of knowledge and intelligence of frontier LLMs and engineer software around it that is finetuned to a very specific environment and very specific uncontroversial corpus. You seem to think that it needs to be perfect to add value. You seem to think that it would consist of giving the answers to questions without using any form of additional validation.

          See it as an engineering challenge rather than an impossibility. How would you make LLMs usable i

    • Depends. As a prof, I have to adapt my courses to account for AI. This is not actually difficult. For me. It is, however, difficult for low-effort students. In some courses, the "normal curve" has become a "U-curve": those who participate, who use AI to support their learning, do very well. Those who use AI to avoid work, fail miserably. There are few students in the middle.

    • You give a calculator to a child who is just learning math because they'll only ever learn to punch in numbers to a magic answer machine.

      We give calculators to kids and then test them on their ability to use it. A calculator is a tool, just like AI is. I think you're missing an important point here. Students can very quickly learn that AI will give them the wrong information and in doing so will learn a real world lesson that definitely will apply after they graduate.

      • We give calculators to kids and then test them on their ability to use it.

        You don't give calculators to kids when they're learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If you do that they'll never learn. Calculators become common when you start with algebra and it's more about understanding how complex operations work and it makes sense to save time when multiplying or dividing large numbers.

        At no point does k-12 mathematics test students on their ability to use a calculator. Any calculations they do with a calculator are ones they've already demonstrated proficie

      • In my college physics courses (for sciences majors), using calculators on exams was prohibited, due to fears of people using programmable calculators to cheat.

        However, the exams were written in such a way that you didn't need a calculator crunch numbers.

    • AI development is only just starting. Anything learned about AI is going to be worthless by the time they graduate.

      This is normal for anything tech related. Being taught one programming language, one design tool, one library, one interface, etc. often means that a new something must be learned once one graduates simply due to the progress of technology. That's normal, and it's definitely not a reason to not learn the something that eventually becomes outdated. It's the learning of the new thing in the first place that is valuable education.

    • AI development is only just starting. Anything learned about AI is going to be worthless by the time they graduate.

      Learning how to be an AI user, learning its strengths and weaknesses, is valuable.

      AI, even in its current form, can be a useful resource comparable to reference books. I've kept all my college textbooks for reference. To be honest, if I need to refresh my recollection on algorithms AI seems to do just as good as job as digging out my old algorithms textbook.

      Besides that, why would they learn anything when they can simply rely on AI to give them the answer?

      Don't textbooks give the answers too? For example, [pseudo-]code for a link list, a binary tree, etc. Also, it's been my experience that like textboo

    • Where people not used to memorize Logarithms tables in the past? Cab drivers hat to remember all street names. Easier in NYC than in some European cities. Times are changing.

      • Seems like a poor comparison. What you reference is rote memorization but I'm talking about understanding concepts. To that end, if I needed to find a value for a logarithm, I have the knowledge to derive it.

  • Dumbing Down (Score:5, Insightful)

    by charles05663 ( 675485 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:00PM (#65435983) Homepage
    It is simply a way to dumb down education all the while make it appear to prepare for the future. Removing critical reasoning skills makes it easier to control the now uneducated.

    • Depends on how it’s done. The professors may actually end up with MORE time on their hands to guide students into effectively learning MORE critical thinking skills - as in, don’t EVER assume the AI is 100% “right” - suss out the strong and subtle biases in the training data - suss out the order of magnitude mistakes in their centrifugal force calculations, etc.

      There are some EXTREMELY promising results in small scale experiments using personalized AI guided elementary school program

  • "In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Ms. Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their A.I. chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life."

    These "technologies" won't last 6 months, much less 60 years. Students could not care less what they're using as a crutch in the future, only that their lack of learning remains unexposed.

    • That quote also reveals how schools are not just willing, but enthusiastically eager to be beholden to big tech companies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        enthusiastically eager to be beholden to big tech companies

        I wouldn't be surprised in the least if there was some payment from the companies to place their tech on campus in this fashion.

  • We fired the human ones.

    • Re:Here's your ChatGPT PROFESSOR! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:17PM (#65436031)
      This is not a joke. My local CSU campus, after 20+ years of bad management and fancy construction projects amidst declining enrollment, has abruptly discontinued the Physics major and the Philosophy major, among others.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

        Philosophy I could see (contrary to popular belief, not every university needs to or even does cover every discipline out there, and this is one has very limited economic demand, even if your intent is to go to law school, which is the most common argument for it.) But physics? It's fundamental to so many other things, not to mention still has a great deal of economic demand.

        • Philosophy and linguistics are the realms best qualified to assess ethics, and source and inferential soundness for whatever is passing as "AI" this week. Philosophers are not lavishly paid, and train for skepticism and rigor. I trust their perspective on issues of ethics and soundness, more than I would trust that of anyone engulfed in the hype, cash, and gigawatt tsunami. I worked for a poorly funded MA Phil. years ago, who believed that corporations should have a philosopher on staff for guidance in e

          • Now they can just ask ChatGPT for guidance.

          • Philosophy and linguistics are the realms best qualified to assess ethics, and source and inferential soundness for whatever is passing as "AI" this week. Philosophers are not lavishly paid, and train for skepticism and rigor.

            I think science does a better job of teaching that. It deals in what we can directly observe and measure, which is called empiricism. Regardless, the argument you're presenting isn't an argument in favor of majoring in philosophy, rather it's an argument in favor of critical thinking, which is what universities used to teach by at least presenting the dissenting view, even if it didn't make any sense. Sometimes, every now and then, the dissenting view has merit. And sometimes, the dissenting view ultimately

      • My local CSU campus ... has abruptly discontinued the Physics major and the Philosophy major, among others.

        *blink* *blink*

        Those two classes should be core. WTF? There is nothing more "knowledge" based than Physics and Philosophy except possibly Math itself. It is arguable that Math is a subset of Philosophy.

      • Hmm (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        "If a tree of mass X falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it..."

    • Professor Hathaway, in the flesh, or not [stevehoffman.tv].

  • Hiring managers: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:06PM (#65436001)

    Note which schools are doing this and therefore you shouldn't recruit from in the future.

    • Why would you? Co-pilot and other AI is being shoved down the throats of the corporate world. It would be quite strange to not hire people specifically experienced with a tool you've been forced to use by your CTO.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's not a thing where I'm at. We actually go out of our way to block all of that and only grant exceptions where the individual employee has a valid claim for it being necessary to get their job done efficiently, and even then, we strictly control and monitor its usage. The main concern we have is we're literally at the cutting edge of our industry -- our competitors, which includes governments, aren't even close. The last thing we want to do is have people dropping sensitive information into AI systems so

  • Stupid (Score:4, Informative)

    by Schoenlepel ( 1751646 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:07PM (#65436005)

    The students will learn effectively nothing about their subject. They'll learn to ask ChatGPT to produce the stuff they want, though.

    However, for working in the fields they're studying for, they'll be completely useless once they finish their education.

  • Not like they weren't already using it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:09PM (#65436009)
    No need for the University to bless you or it's use.
    Google is doing this too, I forget the exact story, they are giving kids "free" access to Gemini for a year.
    The story is about hooking a generation of naive kids to have brand loyalty, then collecting delicious monetizable data for eternity.

    • Also the free (at least to students) MS Office includes copilot pro which is also chaptGPT, right?

      And deepseek is free to everyone?

      I suspect this more about chatGPT data mining than an actual bonus to the students.

  • Wecome to Campus, here's your MS-Office (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @01:39PM (#65436061) Homepage Journal

    A generation or two ago, it was "Welcome to campus, here's your legal copy of Microsoft Office" for free or for a token price, all to get young adults hooked on the product.

    It was the same with credit cards and other things too.

    I assume college students got market-droid-driven freebies long before I went to school and I assume it's still that way today.

    • FWIW, this was also the strategy with UNIX. Put it in the universities and get people hooked on it.

      Seems to have worked out pretty well.

      Also FWIW, when I started college, Office didn't exist, but Word and Excel as individual products did. Available for purchase.

      UNIX came with my computer for "free".

  • So they cannot even host their own LLM? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @02:03PM (#65436091)
    What a pathetic University is this when they need to pay external companies to run LLMs for them to use, instead of at least hosting their own, or better being at the bleeding edge of technology and train their own LLM? I my days at the University, these were the places were people created new technology, not ones where people were conditioned to hand over money and their personal data to corporations to become mindless consumer zombies.

    • This is what happens when you hire more and more administrators and less and less academics. Universities have become institutions of profit, not institutions of learning.

    • What a pathetic University is this when they need to pay external companies to run LLMs for them to use, instead of at least hosting their own, or better being at the bleeding edge of technology and train their own LLM?

      A long time ago in the far off land of EFNET, there was an IRC channel called #c. They ran an eggdrop bot that was written in C++. I asked why that was since they were all C programmers and a bot isn't that hard to write. Same situation.

      So I wrote a bot, in C, for the #c channel and it mimicked all of the used functions of the eggdrop that used to be there. The bot I created is still used there today. (in the #c channel, type clac 2+2, not calc (i made it usable with a common typo))

  • Perfect" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @02:27PM (#65436133) Homepage
    "a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the A.I. "more valuable as you grow and learn."

    So at graduation, chat will be asked to rate each student. And the result, "You get a job, You Get a job, You get crushed..." And remember, this data about each kid will be sold and retained about them forever. I even imagine health insurers, auto insurers, credit score, ... will be customers.

  • Fuck them.

    CSU Chancellor Mildred García is clearly a moron. "Well, the kids are already cheating, so let's just encourage them!"

  • The students are the product (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @03:26PM (#65436227)

    100% this is about giving these big tech companies data on the students, and instead of paying the students or giving them a discount, telling them they are getting something for free.

    At the risk of sounding overblown, this may be the moment higher education in this country really dies to business. They're behind the eight ball in enough ways already, and this just feels like the final death throes.

  • "Where we teach California's best and brightest to bow down to the robot overlords!!

    Get a discounted tuition by joining our athletic program and compete in California State's very own Man v. Robot Thunderdome!"

  • Let ChatGPT do the grading? (Score:3)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @05:11PM (#65436363)

    If every student gets a ChatGPT account and ChatGPT individually remembers the prompts, answers, and related context for each student over their time at university, ChatGPT should be able to have a pretty good idea of how the student performs.

    Maybe this is about gathering data on students.

    Perhaps the professor could ask, "Given the following students in my class, open up their chat history and individually evaluate how much they have learned. Consider how the prompts they have entered correlate to the syllabus and to lecture transcriptions on file, and evaluate if their follow up questions indicate that they were seeking further knowledge or if they where simply trying to complete assignments. Consider if the kinds of prompts entered would be generally considered insightful and indicative of learning or not."

  • AI will evnentually become free (Score:3)

    by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @06:17PM (#65436453) Homepage

    If AI is everything it is hyped to be it will eventually become the norm and built into products by default. It reminds of when cars first got GPS navigation and it costs thousands of dollars to add the option. Now the car makers can't give away their Nav systems since most folks just want to use their phone.... many (maybe most) new cars have Car Play / Android Auto now.

  • For some reason, the Siri in my living-room was in an odd spot. Normally, it would sit on the end wall, glaring over every corner of the room, but here it was on the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side, there was a shallow alcove where I now sat, a nook probably meant for bookshelves when these flats were built. By staying tucked back in this alcove, I could slip out of the Siri’s sight, though it could still catch my voice if I wasn’t careful. As long as I held this position, I was invisible to its watchful eye. The strange layout of the room, this small quirk of design, had sparked the idea for what I was about to do - read a book.

    The modern Siri, enforcing a rigid cultural orthodoxy. Their rules, vague yet absolute, filter out anything they deem harmful, much like The Sanctified Council’s unblinking control. Sitting here, out of sight, I’m dodging their gaze, but I know my words could still betray me if I’m not cautious.

  • Clay Shirky interview about AI in university. When is it enhancing student work and learning vs. "cheating"?

    https://think.kera.org/2025/05... [kera.org]

  • "You have exceeded your quota, here is a text description of a chunk of coal. Now go away, or I shall upload pictures of you as a Studio Ghibli-style action figure to Reddit!"

  • "Welcome to college, here's your ChatGPT"
    as long as it's followed up with

    "Just to let you know, ALL of your testing will be blue-books written during class time, or oral exams. And in certain circumstances, you will be required to orally explain your understanding/mastery of the material."

  • For some reason, the Siri in my living-room was in an odd spot. Normally, it would sit on the end wall, glaring over every corner of the room, but here it was on the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side, there was a shallow alcove where I now sat, a nook probably meant for bookshelves when these flats were built.

    By staying tucked back in this alcove, I could slip out of the Siri’s sight, though it could still catch my voice if I wasn’t careful. As long as I held this position, I was

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