I have been part of several discussions and seen a plethora of posts on the role of AI in universities over the past year, so I thought to write my thoughts down, to hopefully revisit in a few years’ time.

From my view, we are still stuck at the Trial of Socrates. On one end, we have accusations of corrupting influence over youth, and LLMs are a threat to the foundations of learning. Socrates’ defense at the time was that his service to Athens was to act as a gadfly, awakening the youth. A strong metric of academic merit, up to this point, has been tolerance towards busyness - coursework, projects, and exams. This status quo is becoming increasingly unmanageable, as with the “Thirty Tyrants” period that betrayed Athenian democracy and its institutions. I would argue that this balance in academic merit was never meant to be maintainable, but the conversation we have with the introduction of AI in education is that we can no longer ignore it as easily. I do not see educating people to be tolerable of boring tasks and functional as the highest goal. Looking at education from a researcher's point of view, this means having individuals who can take a form of initiative with the resources they are offered.

This process is not independent of students - the university will not shove a new life into your head, give you a degree, and send you on your merry way. Students need to find the inclination and the interest to explore the neat stuff that is lying around. The uniqueness of the university, from my view, is that it cannot work on the passive - as with LLM prompting. Making the most out of it requires an active interaction with resources and staff that are a stone’s throw away.