https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-death-of-the-professor-in-the-age-of-chat-gpt/
For years I have been stating that the university as we know it has been over for a while. I have also stated that the professoriate is dead. Especially for most of those who exist in the social sciences and the humanities, this demise is not necessarily a bad thing. I have written about the professoriate’s hatred of America and of capitalism, the ascendent socialist mindset, and the Marxist indoctrination by the professoriate of our youth. Despite these thoughts and insights, I never thought that I would stand before a class and feel my complete irrelevance as an educator; feel like a relic and some strange creature that should be retired instantly. And all because of an AI language model called Chat GPT.
Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The tool itself and professors are in an arms race against each other – and professors are losing. It usually takes weeks to collect students’ papers after posting an assignment. Deadlines are mostly a thing of the past. When Chat GPT was first launched, however, I had at least nine students turning in well-crafted, eight-page papers within an hour of posting the assignment.
After being a professor in the classroom for twenty-six years, I still spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for my classes. They are a combination of short lectures interspersed with discussion from students. I call on students frequently to respond to what they have read, and to offer analyses made by other students on the assigned readings. This allows us to form a community of thinkers and discoverers—of both fact and values. As a philosophic community we form a “brain attic.” Knowledge is shared collectively but processed individually. At any point each person can share his or her rendition of the facts and concomitant analysis of said facts.
Recently students have been coming to classes late or not at all. Some come to record the classes and type pertinent questions gleaned from the lecture into Chat GPT. Others are fact checking every utterance I make against the wisdom of the AI program. But when I asked a student for his reasoned viewpoint to a point John Locke made in his classic “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” the student typed the question into his computer and said: “It says here that….” and proceeded to read off the AI generated response. In the manner of most students, he made zero eye contact with me. Today, fewer and fewer students are looking at their professors during conversations, lectures and even during in-class discussions. I am speaking of polite and basically good human beings whose socialization via social media has left them bereft of appropriate social skills.