Browse Comments — LLM coded

(sadly, the article is behind a paywall, so I don't know what it says... but I happen to be taking a break from grading essays to scan linkedin to remind myself of other things I could be doing right now lol). It's a sad state of affairs. I think about how the students of today will possess degrees but none of the actual knowledge and skills that those degrees represent. It isn't all of them, thankfully. There are some students in my classes who take a stance against using AI. They see it as harmful to the environment or just think it's wrong. For those few, I carry on trying to do my job. For me, the saddest part is that those that are choosing to shortcut and outsource the difficulty of learning are doing themselves a great disservice. I wish I could convince each one of my students (and all of their parents and caregivers who are guilty of pushing them to get good grades) that the grades ultimately mean nothing. It's what they actually learn that matters. Anyway, I just hope they figure it out before they have to run the planet.

Yes, students can now use AI to generate essays without deeply reading books, but the real issue is not AI itself — it is whether universities are building strong ethical, intellectual, and practical frameworks around it. AI and machine learning can become far more dynamic than static textbooks when designed with reliable data, strong systems, and continuous improvement. But AI cannot replace human judgement, critical thinking, creativity, emotional understanding, or wisdom. What is deeply worrying is the growing gap between powerful AI capability and poor-quality AI implementation — including weak AI-driven recruitment, aggressive behavioural targeting, and low-quality Account-Based Marketing in higher education itself. If even world-leading universities increasingly depend on commercial AI engagement while struggling to protect deep learning cultures, it raises painful questions about financial pressure, institutional priorities, and the future identity of UK higher education.

AI seriously disrupts the business model of academia. For decades, many academics have hidden behind abstruse language, arcane citation rituals, and credentialism to create artificial moats around knowledge. AI tears down those barriers in seconds. The outrage is not really about students becoming less intelligent. If academic standards were the concern, where were these people when grade inflation became the norm? Where were they when universities kept expanding intake to bring in more tuition revenue? Where were they when degrees became products and students became customers? Academia loves to market itself as a meritocracy, but anyone who has spent enough time around universities knows that networks, patronage, academic lineage, departmental cliques, and ideological tribes often matter as much as talent. Brilliant people are routinely excluded because they lack the right supervisor, the right institution, or the right connections. Many academic careers are built as much on who you know as what you know. What AI threatens is not learning. It threatens gatekeeping. It threatens the ability of a small class of experts to act as custodians of knowledge and arbiters of legitimacy. The whole noise is about protecting business.

Unfortunately, even before this AI has appeared, many ( perhaps most ) students graduated without reading a book. The question is what do people read these days? Only a small intellectually inclined elite reads anything substantial at all. The internet killed reading long time before generative AI. The issue now is that people do not read anything deep, just headlines and bullets on powerpoint and many students think that learning is all a about memorizing sentences, problem patterns, and blackbox procedures. This has proven to be the best strategy to get maximum grades. This model is not sustainable in the era of AI. We got to be more ambitious, and keep challenging the potential of the best students.

Ramon Portillo, Ph.D. Maybe in some places, but I happen to be sitting in front of over 120 papers and have read them and graded them myself. There was no AI used to evaluate the papers. There wasn't even a TA. You might want to think about who you are throwing under the bus here with this assumptive statement about "academia". While different schools have different climates towards research vs. teaching, I think it is fair to say that many of us take our jobs as educators and experts in our fields seriously.