Last year, California State University signed a $17 million deal with OpenAI to provide its over half a million students and faculty with ChatGPT Edu, an education-focused version of the company’s flagship chatbot. It was a statement move for both parties: OpenAI clinched the largest public university system in the country, and CSU secured bragging rights for being pioneering adopters of the latest revolutionary tech. This was the big stage for AI’s dazzling promises of supercharged learning to shine on.
CSU students, however, have come to see the tech differently. Around 65 percent of them — and 59 percent of faculty there — are skeptical that AI has been benefitting education overall, according to a recent university-wide survey with over 94,000 respondents. A full 80 percent of students said they wouldn’t be comfortable turning in AI-generated work as their own. And around four out of five of them were worried about various AI issues, including its impact on jobs, creativity, and the environment.
If part of the intent behind the collaboration was to win new AI converts, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
“They’re ethically opposed to the environmental impacts and the bias and the erasure of their jobs and voices and creativity,” CSU English professor Jennifer Trainor told NPR. “[They] don’t like it.”
The ambivalent student sentiment is especially striking when you consider how widespread AI use on campus has become. In the survey, 84 percent of students said they used ChatGPT, and 64 percent said AI positively affected their learning. Roughly half used AI regularly.
But even as they’re heavily encouraged by their institution to use AI — not to mention bombarbed by all the noise coming out of the AI industry itself — students can’t shake off some deep-seated reservations about the tech. Some are completely opposed, with Trainor describing that there was a “groundswelling of resistance” to AI on the campus. Taking aim at the school’s administration, one student vented to NPR that she was a “little disappointed that they accepted [AI] with open arms immediately.”
There’s more than a hint of optics, instead of merely education value, being a major factor behind the ChatGPT deal. University leaders called a potential OpenAI partnership a “huge branding opp[ortunity]” in an internal planning document obtained by NPR. At a press conference announcing the partnership, CSU chancellor Mildred García bragged that “no other university system in the US or internationally is doing anything like this, not at this scale.”
Of course, there’s good reason to be cautious around AI as an educational tool and not treat hundreds of thousands of students as a big tech experiment. The long-term effects of AI on mental health and learning are still unknown. But a burgeoning body of evidence has associated AI usage with impaired critical thinking skills, memory loss, lower brain activity during cognitive tasks, and other deleterious cognitive effects. That’s not to mention the temptation it brings as an effortless cheating tool.
CSU faculty are just as ambivalent as students. About 52 percent of professors and instructors said that AI had negatively affected their teaching, and 40 percent said they either discourage or outright forbid AI in the classroom. Some hope for campus-wide reform. Martha Kenney, a professor and science and technology scholar, led a petition demanding CSU not renew its contract with OpenAI.
“I think refusing this technology needs to be a position that’s on the table,” Kenney told NPR.
CSU renewed its contract with OpenAI this month, agreeing to pay $13 million a year for the next three years. The decision was made despite the university facing steep budget cuts that could slash $144 million.
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