I'm a little worried about how artificial intelligence might affect students’ motivation, sense of identity, and intuition around knowledge production and consumption.
A lot of us in higher education are thinking about using AI tools creatively, perhaps even embracing them. This is ultimately probably the right thing to do. But it’s going to be difficult to do right, especially if we rush.
Students already have access to tools that can write for them, improve their writing, perform literature searches, summarise arguments, provide basic critical analysis, create slide decks, and take the role of a tutor. With the right subscription, you can even get a bot to go online to try to accomplish long lists of automated tasks to achieve all manner of projects.
So these tools suddenly make it really easy to do all kinds of things, very quickly, that used to be hard and slow. Many of these things used to be essential to the intrinsic value of university work – planning, decision-making, struggling, searching, assessing sources, grappling with difficult texts, and learning to accept the discomfort of uncertainty.
