University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper today - Editorial: Penn has an AI problem

[highplainsdem]

https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/03/penn-ai-dominance-education

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While it may seem convenient to plug a problem set or 40-page reading into ChatGPT, the drawbacks of AI usage are widely documented and increasingly detrimental. Students develop an overreliance on AI, social interaction and communication are reduced, AI programs produce and reinforce biased and false information without any accountability, and critical thinking is inhibited. As Penn students, our purpose is to take advantage of our education, not give it away to an AI model while we sit by passively.

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Through its countless new programs and AI-centered events, Penn has positioned AI as an inescapable future that we all must accept in order to achieve success. There is no doubt that AI is part of the current occupational landscape, and we will certainly encounter it long after we graduate. Nevertheless, we attend this institution to develop hard skills, question the world around us, solve problems, produce new ideas, and the ability to think for ourselves. With the University forcing AI into our learning every chance it gets, do we end up gaining knowledge or cheat codes?

Goldman Sachs reports that 300 million full-time jobs could be replaced by AI by 2030. Labor turnover is high and hiring has slowed. 71% of Americans worry that AI will cause permanent job loss. As young people about to enter the workforce for the first time, the fear of unemployment is understandable, but we cannot save ourselves with the very tool that is putting us at risk.

The irony is that as Penn pours endless money and energy into AI advancement in its attempt to get ahead, the University is only quickening its own demise. AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship.

"AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it."

The students who realize this are much smarter than the AI-addled admins and teachers.

This is one of the universities partnering with OpenAI, whose robber baron CEO has been desperately trying to force AI into all aspects of education (have to get the kids addicted, ideally to one AI company's products, and OpenAI has a partnership with Mattel to get to the kids they can't hook through classrooms).

[Boo1]

1. Counterpoint...

Anyone graduating today without a deep understanding of how to increase their productivity with AI can expect to not get a job.

[highplainsdem]

2. Counterpoint - Hiring of recent grads is already way down because of AI. And learning to prompt AI

is child's play, and advice on how to best prompt AI changes constantly with different AI models.

What focusing on AI is doing is depriving students of acquiring real knowledge and real critical thinking skills.

Without that real knowledge, they're less likely to catch errors hallucinating AI models inevitably make.

Without critical thinking skills, they can't function at work as anything but a poorly paid assistant for AI, and they can't function in society as a thinking human being instead of an uneducated victim of propaganda and whatever BS genAI vomits out, which will increasingly be at the direction of wannabe fascist AI bros.

[GenThePerservering]

3. Weak. nt

[Boo1]

4. AI isn't going away

and it's use is going to continue to increase rapidly.

[highplainsdem]

6. See paragraphs 5-7 of this open letter to students at Georgetown, starting

with these words at the beginning of the 5th paragraph:

https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef

One piece of evidence that they view your disempowerment as necessary for their survival is that their entire messaging strategy is to try to persuade you that there is nothing you can do but submit to their domination, and to threaten you with dire consequences if you do not. You cannot spend an hour online without being bombarded by propagandistic articles, videos and ads about the “inevitability” and “unstoppability” of the “AI revolution,”.....

There was a lot else in that letter that's important, and I posted an OP about it here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221114263

[anciano]

5. Whether one likes it or hates it...

AI has been the major technological innovation of this century. When used appropriately and responsibly, I have found genAI to be an efficient and effective tool for obtaining information, evaluating ideas, and enhancing the thinking process. I also believe that humans will soon be able to use a fusion of various AI capabilities as implants to enhance their daily lives in a wide range of practical applications. 21st century needs and problems require 21st century tools and solutions.

[highplainsdem]

7. See reply 6.