A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
I just realised why I find AI enthusiasts so repulsive. I was already aware of how rude it is for someone to share the output from an LLM. Someone sharing an opinion they formed based on such an interaction, I realised is as repugnant, if not more.
Or to put it in a different way: “I couldn’t form my own opinion on the matter. So I shook a magic 8 cube a bunch of times, and the ‘conversation’ we had, is something I think is worth while for others to hear”.