The AI Zombification of Universities
SMRTR summary
At a recent UCLA graduation, a student held up a ChatGPT window for the cameras. Funny, maybe. But to one University of Chicago student, it signals something far darker.
Owen Yingling, a 21-year-old philosophy student, describes AI use on elite campuses not as a cheating problem but as a metastatic cancer, spreading from lazy business economics courses into economics exams, humanities papers, student newspapers, and now, he suspects, faculty lecture notes.
The tumor analogy isn't just rhetorical. Yingling watched a classmate surrender homework, emails, texts, even their dating life to an AI, piece by piece, like a host slowly absorbed by a parasite.
Meanwhile, universities respond with $50 million AI initiatives and glossy press releases. Princeton's cheating cases nearly doubled in one year, even as administrators championed "AI literacy."
Yingling's verdict is bleak but honest: what's happening on campuses isn't integration. It's substitution. And no one in charge seems willing to admit it.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Hacker News.
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