History Should Temper Our AI Hysteria

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has caught many in higher education off-guard. Some schools and institutions are outright banning the use of ChatGPT, professors are accusing innocent students of using the tools to cheat, and institutions are bracing for a “chaotic” semester ahead. Other observers are predicting that AI will save the world or end humanity within a decade.

But while it’s true that AI represents a seismic shift that could bring many new complications and opportunities to college campuses, the debate surrounding it feels strangely familiar. From the mid-1990s through early aughts, I was writing about a similarly disruptive technology: the modern internet. Same hysteria, different day. Educators were at odds over where the World Wide Web might take us. “To these rival camps,” a colleague and I wrote in 2000, “the digital age is either the onramp to the apocalypse or the highway to heaven.”

Of course, there was also a third camp, a reasoned center of thoughtful critics and careful advocates. We offered those educators a framework for incorporating the internet into the classroom — and it’s one I find myself returning to now more than two decades later. We argued that to navigate the emergence of the internet and other digital innovations of the time, higher education must help students learn about, with, and beyond technology. It’s a playbook that still works.

Learn About AI

In many ways, AI has been quietly transforming how we learn and work for years. Still, the swift evolution of generative AI has finally cemented the technology in the mainstream.

AI literacy is quickly becoming a core competency that all students must master. It’s imperative they understand how AI is impacting their learning, their future profession, their lives, their democracy, and the world around them. As educators, our role is to help students learn not only how to use the growing number of AI tools now available, but also how they are designed and how they work.

The CEO of Indeed recently argued that, thanks to AI, “it’s conceivable that students might now find themselves learning skills in college that are obsolete by the time they graduate.” That’s how fast the world is changing — and it’s our responsibility to help students prepare for a rapidly evolving future of work.

Learn With AI

New York’s John Jay College recently made headlines when it announced that its use of AI had boosted the graduate rates of its students by 32 percentage points.

This kind of story is happening all over the country as institutions realize that AI has enormous potential to help students learn more effectively, efficiently, and deeply. AI technologies are evening the playing field, allowing first-generation learners and students from low-income backgrounds to access the same kinds of information, knowledge, and support that students from more privileged backgrounds have always enjoyed.

For example, some institutions have been using AI chatbots for years to answer students’ basic questions about support services or administrative deadlines. Those tools are now becoming dramatically more sophisticated, capable of answering a far more significant number of increasingly complex queries and conducting their own sentiment analysis to gauge when students need extra support.

For example, National University, where I serve as president, has deployed a conversational chatbot called NUton (pronounced Newton), designed by AI firm Mainstay. Based on student responses, the technology identifies when students might need more personalized help, tagging and flagging the conversation for a staff member to follow up on. Arizona State University has a similar bot named Sunny.

Learn Beyond AI

The final step of the playbook is likely the most difficult to carry out. Educators should help students develop the problem-solving and citizenship skills they need to think deeply about the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI.

Learners need to understand both the power of the technology and the constraints of it. And they need to understand how it is evolving, what’s behind that evolution, and where we might be headed next. They need to learn beyond AI. The challenge, of course, is that educators are going through this very same learning process.

It’s important to remember, however, that as impressive as this technology is, and as fast as the pace of change has become, we’ve been here before. Higher education worked to adapt to the internet, to social media, to mobile technology. So, take a deep breath — and take a look at history.

Let what we have learned in the past help us avoid making some of the same early mistakes that so often accompany technological change. And let’s chart a path forward that thoughtfully and meaningfully prepares students for living in a world with AI, not just living in fear or awe of it.