Universities Should Ban AI Outright

The Pope is concerned about AI impacting negatively on our humanity; the valuation of Anthropic rises to nearly one trillion dollars. It’s time to come out as an AI Luddite. I’ve worked in education my whole adult life, and it’s education that leads me to this position.

AI’s supporters say that it will make us all – including in education – more productive. A tiny minority of already extremely productive people conceivably could become even more prolific. Most of us will not. Our fate is that AI will make us increasingly lazy and intellectually deformed.

The trend is clear: soon in universities, faculty won’t write syllabi anymore. They won’t set essay questions and examinations. AI is doing much of this already. Soon it will do it all.

In their turn, students won’t be writing essays. At best, they will adapt the work that AI produces, with the sole aim of making it look less like AI has created it. But as AI will be grading the work, they won’t have to worry about even that.

Three years ago, as Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham, I asked ChatGPT to write a graduation speech. It was nowhere near as good as the one I wrote unaided. To inject some humour into the proceedings, I included three paragraphs from AI in my speech, challenging parents and graduands to let me know in the drinks reception afterwards which paragraphs were not my own. Everyone got it right, that human writing being far superior then without a doubt.

Fast forward three years, in my final year as Vice-Chancellor, following the advice of several other university leaders who said it was what they were all doing now, I asked ChatGPT again. In a matter of seconds, it created a finely-honed speech that was much, much better than anything I could achieve through hours of laborious work. I gave it other tasks which were key to academic work – summarising important authors, highlighting relevant literature – and realised that it was leaving me far behind.

Then I knew we were in trouble. Much of what makes up the core of intellectual work – the ability to construct an argument, the ability to summarise, to précis, all abilities that I had thought were key to human engagement with the world – were now capable of being done better by AI.

So why not let it get on with this? Because that would mean our students losing these abilities forever, with faculty following not so far behind. Using AI is so intoxicating, students will no longer learn the basics of intellectual work and the underpinnings of our humanity.

For young people, becoming reliant on AI – as any user will become – is catastrophic. Letting ChatGPT do all the intellectual heavy lifting is like going to the gym and getting someone else to do, well, the heavy lifting (physical) for you instead. You could say, of course, the workout has been completed, the weights have been through all the motions, the necessary fitness steps have been achieved. Just not by you. There would be no benefit at all to your physical development. Likewise for intellectual development and AI.

What is required now is for a university to bite the bullet and ban AI altogether. Best of all, it should go back to physical books because in an AI-infected internet, these are now the only sources of knowledge that we can trust. Abandoning AI and going back to books is the only way now we can educate students in the best that has been thought and said, to better understand the meaning of our lives and our place in the universe, and to assist in the development of character.

Just as the University of Buckingham had to be created 50 years ago to address the problem emerging then, of overreach of government in higher education, there is now an urgent need for a new AI-liberated university to emerge.

It will need courage to bring this about. But parents and employers will soon see the difference between this new university’s graduates and those brought up on the false comfort of AI; it will be swamped with admissions.

The Luddites arose out of the first industrial revolution. Their inspiration was the – possibly apocryphal – Ned Ludd who, reportedly, smashed the textile machines in protest at how they were destroying the world his movement wished to conserve.

In education, we will smash the new ‘machines’, AI. We will create new universities, and parallel schools while we are at it, that will enhance human dignity in the time-honoured way, through individual intellectual and character development, not by getting an artificial intelligence to push us to one side. The neo-Luddites will not let our spirits be crushed or our intelligence made obsolete; maintaining our human dignity depends on it.

James Tooley was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham.