Adopt or Resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars
How to find a middle ground about a technology that is, and will remain, unavoidable for virtually every discipline.
“Not long ago, a tech startup created an avatar of Anne Frank urging students not to blame anyone for the Holocaust. If that sentence doesn’t make you pause and consider what we’re dealing with in education, nothing will.
We’ve entered completely new territory with generative AI and should stop using analogies to try and explain its impact. AI is not like the introduction of calculators. As Alison Gopnik so thoughtfully opined, generative AI is a cultural technology that is reshaping how we interact with information and one another. We haven’t had to deal with anything like this before in education, and AI’s impact won’t be confined to coursework.
In January, I hosted the University of Mississippi’s third AI Institute for Teachers. Faculty members arrived armed with questions about how to detect students’ use of these tools, redesign assignments, and draft syllabus policies on the topic. But I greeted them with far thornier questions: What does it mean to teach in a world where machines simulate human thought? How do we prepare students for a future in which “authenticity” is mediated by algorithms?
When confronted with tools like ChatGPT, faculty members tend to cluster around one of two extremes — uncritical acceptance of AI as inevitable or outright rejection of it as an ethical threat. But clinging to either view obscures the real challenge: how to develop thoughtful, practical approaches to deal with this shifting landscape. Generative AI is unavoidable, but its potential impact in higher ed is far from inevitable. The former speaks to the reality of our technological moment, while the latter to all the hype, much of it a sales pitch and little else. The recent news from China about the DeepSeek reasoning model shook tech and energy markets, in part, because it challenges the narrative that U.S. companies like OpenAI would always dominate this market.”
Read more about AI culture wars at The Chronicle of Higher Education.