Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

noosphr

>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.

dkarl

> Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it. I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.

Reubend

> 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.

Avicebron

I feel like adding more internships with the companies like OpenAI, Oracle, etc would go a long way in improving outcomes and is probably even cheaper than donating licenses and compute.

vondur

Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.

harshreality

> The university now has an A.I. librarian Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.

elicash

> In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same. This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.

wr1276

"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.

phyzome

A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.

dyauspitr

What is this chaos? The article doesn’t mention any of it, just some small insignificant amount spent of implementing it.

chadash

Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI. As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.

beej71

I asked my students how they felt about having AI teacher avatars and they had a lot of negative things to say. The one thing that stood out the most to me was "it's disrespectful".

1vuio0pswjnm7

Actual title: A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It's Tearing Itself Apart.

BobbyTables2

Elementary and secondary schools are too content to use AI both for test question generation and grading of student responses… What are we even doing here?