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AI Education

Ohio University Says All Students Will Be Required To Train and 'Be Fluent' In AI (theguardian.com) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the all-in-on-AI dept.
Ohio State University is launching a campus-wide AI fluency initiative requiring all students to integrate AI into their studies, aiming to make them proficient in both their major and the responsible use of AI. "Ohio State has an opportunity and responsibility to prepare students to not just keep up, but lead in this workforce of the future," said the university's president, Walter "Ted" Carter Jr. He added: "Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn. In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be [affected] in some way by AI." The Guardian reports: The university said its program will prioritize the incoming freshman class and onward, in order to make every Ohio State graduate "fluent in AI and how it can be responsibly applied to advance their field." [...] Steven Brown, an associate professor of philosophy at the university, told NBC News that after students turned in the first batch of AI-assisted papers he found "a lot of really creative ideas."

"My favorite one is still a paper on karma and the practice of returning shopping carts," Brown said. Brown said that banning AI from classwork is "shortsighted," and he encouraged his students to discuss ethics and philosophy with AI chatbots. "It would be a disaster for our students to have no idea how to effectively use one of the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created," Brown said. "AI is such a powerful tool for self-education that we must rapidly adapt our pedagogy or be left in the dust."

Separately, Ohio's AI in Education Coalition is working to develop a comprehensive strategy to ensure that the state's K-12 education system, encompassing the years of formal schooling from kindergarten through 12th grade in high school, is prepared for and can help lead the AI revolution. "AI technology is here to stay," then lieutenant governor Jon Husted said last year while announcing an AI toolkit for Ohio's K-12 school districts that he added would ensure the state "is a leader in responding to the challenges and opportunities made possible by artificial intelligence."

Ohio University Says All Students Will Be Required To Train and 'Be Fluent' In AI More | Reply

Ohio University Says All Students Will Be Required To Train and 'Be Fluent' In AI

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  • AI, Do my homework and exams (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @06:54PM (#65438741)

    That should cover it.

    • But it doesn't. For example, the lawyers that keep submitting court filings with fake references evidently have wrong assumptions about what AI is and is not (for now)

      https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

      • Don't worry, Ohio University I'm sure will back anyone who graduates with a legal degree from them, providing them with compensation and a free alternative degree program in something useful (with living costs included) when they're inevitably disbarred.

        And that'll go for any other profession where their students have followed their University's advice and decided they don't need to understand a topic, just plug in questions into the spicy autocorrect machine.

      • What if it's the same AI doing the grading?

    • Just don't cite any fake sources.

      Turnitin.com can simply add a citation checker, and teachers will know exactly who got AI to write their homework answers.

    • 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]

      He also says if you massage the AI enough and use 2 different ones, it's nearly impossible to tell AI was used, assuming the student's base language skills are decent.

  • The biggest part - Train (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tyr07 ( 8900565 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @06:59PM (#65438765)

    They're trying to be you know, hip with the times, but really they're just saiying they're going to require all students to give over their data to AI to train it, and the university is going to sell the training data.

  • Isn't the university getting cheap labour out of this?

  • "I'm going to be managing AIs and telling them what to do!"

    "I hate to break it to you, but you need to be somewhat accurate and precise in your words. A good vocabulary is also pretty important."

    "Pfft! I don't need to spell or know a lot of words, I'll have AI for that!"

  • The enshittification continues apace... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:10PM (#65438791) Homepage

    How long until Ohio State University degrees are as worthless as toilet paper?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Are they worth anything now?

    • The real question is how many of these entering freshmen will have jobs in their major waiting for them when they graduate? If you want a job in 4 years you should be learning something that AI can't do (or even help you do) yet.
    • How can anyone who lived through covid compare something as valuable as toilet paper to some crappy kind of paper you can barely wipe with?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      My guess would be they already are.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by SumDog ( 466607 )
      Go Buckeyes!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lisias ( 447563 )

      How long until Ohio State University degrees are as worthless as toilet paper?

      15 Minutes. I just added this University to my black list.

  • Such a good tool indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cley Faye ( 1123605 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:13PM (#65438801) Homepage

    AI is such a powerful tool for self education

    This is worrying. AI, or frankly speaking AI gen, can do a fair amount of thing. Whether it is useful or not, or a good idea, is up for debate. But leaving education to a statistical model that may or may not have been curated (and, curated by who and for what purpose) is pure foolishness. The most basic thing people will tell you, even people that advocate (responsible) use of these models, is that you have to be able to check, nay, double check their output. That's not very compatible with self education, especially if the output of some AI agent becomes your only frame of reference.

    If they want to teach anything about AI, is that it must be treated as a partially knowledgeable, unreliable third party, that have to be tightly controlled. It can do many thing, some of these really fast, but still needs someone to overshadow it.

    • You are right problem is you need the knowledge first in order to check the AI my fear is that they make students lean using AI before they have learnt how to do it themselves. Kind of like you should teach people to add before you give them a calculator, but worse because that calculator can get it very wrong.

  • _NOT_ Ohio University (Score:4, Informative)

    by Fly766 ( 634059 ) <(moc.liamtoh) (ta) (edohcbob)> on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:16PM (#65438803)
    Major peeve of mine... Ohio University is a very different (and much better) place than that buckeye college... Headline should read "AN Ohio University..." Go Bobcats!

  • ...because the current crop of AI systems have a tendency to hallucinate plausible-sounding bullshit. If your question has a correct answer, you can't count on AI to give it to you.

    You can count on it to give you answer that LOOKS correct, but that's not the same thing at all.

  • Leaders will lead (Score:3)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:47PM (#65438891)
    AI is evolving faster than any educational system around here could keep up with...

    Unlessssss... they could truly go back to Socratic ideals... training of the mind, not just the use of the latest tool. You have to think more deeply on purpose. Like the study of math. It's "hard." How much do you want to know? It's never finished until you are.

  • Yeah, I don't see any problems with that.

  • Had to be saidâ¦

  • Training students to use upcoming products? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've never seen so much collusion between schools and an emerging market trying to find ways to be relevant. They thought kids who attended class through Zoom during covid had some lost years...

    • The freshmen in college now are the same students who lost a couple years of middle/high school in 2020.

      The quality of schools in the US has been on a downward trend for decades, but with this latest group I think the deteriorating might be so swift, jarring, and noticeable that it actually does have an effect on the credibility of education as a whole. The frog isn't being boiled slowly anymore.

  • That's all this is. One of the AI Bros gave somebody over there a bunch of money.

    This is what happens when you underfund your University system it rapidly becomes corrupt. There's a reason why there was a lot less of this crap 20-30 years ago when our dumbasses were in college.

    And notice I said less. I am so sick and fucking tired of how Americans cannot comprehend the slightest amount of nuance.

  • Ohio State University sees the future of work and they realize there's no point in complaining about it. People are going to be herding AI agents for a living and they might as well get used to it. Do it now as part of your curriculum, and get better at it than most people. Employers want results. Figure out how to use modern tools to be massively productive and you could get a job. It might even be interesting.

  • It's already starting to happen with job cuts. Better find something where AI can't replace you !

  • There is nothing simpler than *using* AI, just write a prompt and get your result. That's the whole point of AI, any dumbass can use it. "Prompt engineering" is overrated unless it is a system prompt of if you are doing stuff like jailbreaking or prompt injection, neither are particularly relevant to "normal" use, and not that hard anyways. The only thing you really need to know is that sometimes, LLMs hallucinate, so you need to verify. And sure enough fact checking is something all universities should tea

  • How to look like you're working while outsourcing thinking to LLMs.

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