Can Our Current Academic Model Go On in the Age of AI?
It has been almost three years since ChatGPT was released in the public arena amid great hopes, worries, and, perhaps more than anything, hype. While artificial intelligence tools, including of the Large Language Model variety to which ChatGPT belongs, were already deployed in many areas by then, it was this event that sparked both widespread obsession with AI and the subsequent pouring of trillions of dollars into AI development in just three years. Meanwhile, though still relatively in its infancy, Generative AI has indeed impacted numerous fields, and these include education and research, which together form the core dimensions of academia. Some of the concerns raised by the usage of Generative AI in academia, especially when it comes to student evaluations, have already been taken up on this blog, here, here, here, and here. In fact, out of all the Justice Everywehere posts focusing on AI in the past three years, exactly half looked at this particular problem, which is unsurprising, since on the one hand most of the contributors to this blog are educators, and on the other one that political philosophy is methodologically built around the capacity to engage in original thinking. In this post, which inaugurates the new season of Justice Everywhere, I want to signal a broader issue, which is – to put it bluntly – that key aspects of the way in which academia currently works are likely to be upended by AI in the near future. And, crucially, that as a collective, we seem to be dangerously inert in the face of this scenario.
