The following is based on anonymous reports from teaching staff and students, my personal opinion, and a healthy helping of speculation. We cannot find any evidence this is certainly happening; there is no uni statement or policy I could find from a google search. However, if the university is mandating that teaching staff include AI in their coursework (at any scale), we do not believe this is acceptable of any tertiary education. So, if you’re pissed at your lecturers adding AI to the learning material and assignments, they might be as reluctant as you. I have spoken with many students who either like the AI assignments because they’re easy, reluctantly go along with it, or refuse those assignments on grounds of (reasonably valid) moral superiority. We’ve all heard the environmental argument against AI so I won’t beat a horse who died of thirst. I have been led to believe there is relative solidarity amongst students and teaching staff against the uni’s imposition of AI, and where there isn’t, I encourage academics to read my latest editorial on AI. I effectively stated that there is a generational miscommunication wherein everyone too old for tiktok assumes Gen Z like AI (we, largely, do not). Now onto my personal concerns. If the uni forces teachers and students to include AI in tertiary education, then to a degree, the uni is responding to AI. As I see it, if academia becomes a response to AI, then it is somewhat fundamentally changed. The academy has done much the same thing for thousands of years, codified reality and argued semantics (among other professorial pass times), and in responding to AI, we risk tarnishing the sanctity of education and shifting its focus. AI belongs as a buzzword tossed around a board of investors not as an ethical and data concern infringing our lecture theatres and Moodle dashboards. Don’t get me wrong, AI can have a place in academia. Students and researchers may choose to use AI in their methodology, or write about it, but that is their choice, and it being a choice is precisely my point. I think part of the uni’s thinking is so we, as students, can understand how AI works and use it better than an Otago uni graduate, for example. But we – as young people who grew up online – feel as though we already know more than the Gen X+ lecturer trying to explain it. If students and teachers want to explore technological changes it should be their choice not the uni’s.
