California Colleges Test AI Partnerships. Critics Complain It's Risky and Wasteful

America's largest university system, with 460,000 students, is the 22-campus 'Cal State' system, reports the New York Times. And it's recently teamed with Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia, hoping to embed chatbots in both teaching and learning to become what it says will be America's 'first and largest AI-empowered' university' — and prepare students for 'increasingly AI-driven' careers.

It's part of a trend of major universities inviting tech companies into 'a much bigger role as education thought partners, AI instructors and curriculum providers,' argues the New York Times, where 'dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about AI, and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking...'

'Critics say Silicon Valley's effort to make AI chatbots integral to education amounts to a mass experiment on young people.'

As part of the effort, [Cal State] is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company's tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world's largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an AI committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students' career opportunities... Cal State is not alone. Last month, California Community Colleges, the nation's largest community college system, announced a collaboration with Google to supply the company's 'cutting edge AI tools' and training to 2.1 million students and faculty. In July, Microsoft pledged $4 billion for teaching AI skills in schools, community colleges and to adult workers...

[A]s schools like Cal State work to usher in what they call an 'AI-driven future,' some researchers warn that universities risk ceding their independence to Silicon Valley. 'Universities are not tech companies,' Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, recently said in comments arguing against fast AI adoption in academia. 'Our role is to foster critical thinking,' the researchers said, 'not to follow industry trends uncritically....'

Some faculty members have pushed back against the AI effort, as the university system faces steep budget cuts. The multimillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — which the university did not open to bidding from rivals like Google — was wasteful, they added. Faculty senates on several Cal State campuses passed resolutions this year criticizing the AI initiative, saying the university had failed to adequately address students using chatbots to cheat. Professors also said administrators' plans glossed over the risks of AI to students' critical thinking and ignored troubling industry labor practices and environmental costs.

Martha Kenney, a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, described the AI program as a Cal State marketing vehicle helping tech companies promote unproven chatbots as legitimate educational tools.

The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer 'defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.

'Still, California's community college system landed AI chatbot services from Google for more than 2 million students and faculty — nearly four times the number of users Cal State is paying OpenAI for — for free.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.