Like Colorado ‘resisters,’ CU casts a wary eye at AI
But a liberal-arts education in the classical sense is the best guarantor of AI’s potential benefits and our best defense against its likely harms
With artificial intelligence, resistance is not futile. It is critical.
But as AI reshapes the world and even threatens to, it is not enough to resist. We must also understand and adapt. Emerging leaders of society need knowledge and wisdom, which higher education is uniquely poised to gather and share.
AI-resistance has sprung up in Ի. There’s an, and even tech titans like Bill Gates are warning about the “.” Additionally, AI “conscientious objectors” at the raise critically important concerns about AI.
Ҵýƽ information science graduate student Mirakle Wright is studying the resistance. She observed a disconnect between common reports (that most people are eager to adopt AI) and the real world (fellow CU students often shun AI).
When she strove to understand why, she found that most of her research subjects objected to AI’s environmental harm and its data-privacy breaches, along with its contribution to cognitive decline and its role as a “giant plagiarism machine.”
"Humans need new, careful thinking, and this is what we foster. A liberal-arts education in the classical sense is the best guarantor of AI’s potential benefits and our best defense against its likely harms."
Most students Wright studied “said something like the university is supposed to foster intellectualism and debate and analysis, and that AI is the complete opposite to that,” the Denver Post reported.
All these concerns, which are expressed on campuses nationwide, are valid, as are fears about AI’s looming effect on the workplace. AI could affect 300 million jobs worldwide,. It could obliterate 9.6 million jobs in the next two to five years, the predicts.
This is distressing, but it does not mean the university should isolate itself from AI. We are obliged to focus on the future, which, like it or not, will include AI. That’s why Ҵýƽ scholars, scientists and artists are teaching students how to manage AI ethically, strengthening our grasp of how humans can best manage AI, and exploring new frontiers in artistic expression.
And that’s why, when the CU system’s initial contract with OpenAI for a CU-specific ChatGPT prompted well-founded critiques of the agreement’s shortcomings, the university drew upon the expertise of our own faculty to create new AI-literacy training material for CU students and employees.
Peer-reviewed studies have shown that AI “without guardrails” harms learning. But Ҵýƽ faculty are reinforcing the guardrails to ensure that the tool augments but does not supplant learning.
Ҵýƽ Philosophy Professor Robert Pasnau ponders ways in which AI can responsibly augment scholarship. Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, he argued that AI can help scholars understand the humanities in ways never before possible, as long as humans decide what questions are most important:
“Rather than see AI as an excuse to think less, I see it as an opportunity to think harder and to broaden and deepen our understanding.”
And Teresa Nugent, Ҵýƽ associate teaching professor of English, exemplifies efforts to ensure AI literacy. She teaches a course about writing in the age of AI and urges students to test the accuracy of AI’s textual analysis and to probe how (or whether) AI should be incorporated into their field of study.
When a college or university is committed to a broad liberal arts education —as the Ҵýƽ College of Arts and Sciences is—students are exposed to a broad array of disciplines, giving them academic breadth and depth, the ability to think critically, and the capacity to make powerful new intellectual and creative leaps that could never be anticipated by predictive analytics.
Humans need new, careful thinking, and this is what we foster. A liberal-arts education in the classical sense is the best guarantor of AI’s potential benefits and our best defense against its likely harms.
Like the AI critics, I worry that humans are losing cognitive muscle, reading capacity and analytical prowess. But I am heartened by our faculty’s work to weave AI into their teaching, research and creative work, and by their efforts to do so judiciously, ethically and wisely.
Together, we can ensure that our future is shaped by careful human reason and creative human invention, not by algorithms that have done the thinking for us.
Katherine Eggert is interim dean of the Ҵýƽ College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of English. She has also served as vice chancellor and senior vice provost for academic planning and assessment.
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