📰 AI News: “AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself”

📝 TL;DR

A new long form essay argues that generative AI is quietly hollowing out universities from the inside. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to teach and grade, and the result is a degree with less and less real thinking behind it.

🧠 Overview

A professor at a U.S. public university has written a blistering critique of how AI is being integrated into higher education. He argues that universities are turning into “Chatversities” where students outsource thinking to AI, administrators partner with AI vendors, and everyone pretends real learning is still happening. The piece frames this not as a tech problem, but as a deeper crisis of incentives, corporatization, and what education is actually for.

📜 The Announcement

The article describes what is already happening on the ground. Large university systems are signing campus wide deals for “edu” versions of chatbots, while faculty are encouraged to redesign courses around AI tools. At the same time, many students are using the same tools to generate essays, complete assignments, and even cheat on tests. The author argues that this “cheating AI” ecosystem is turning higher education into a high priced credential machine with very little genuine cognitive development happening underneath.

⚙️ How It Works

→ Students offload the hard thinking

They paste prompts into AI, get passable essays or solutions, lightly edit, and submit. Over time they practice “prompting” instead of analysis, memory, or writing.

→ Universities join the AI arms raceInstitutions partner with AI companies for teaching tools, then also buy AI detectors to police cheating, creating a loop where tech firms profit at every step.

→ Faculty are quietly pushed to automate their own work

Overloaded teachers are nudged to use AI to write lectures, slides, assignments, and feedback. That saves time but also erodes craft, care, and the teacher’s own voice.

→ Degrees risk becoming “bullshit credentials”

If AI can generate most student work and faculty barely intervene, you end up with students who hold degrees but have not built the underlying skills those degrees are supposed to signal.

💡 Why This Matters

It separates “having a degree” from “having skills.” - If AI does the thinking and writing, many graduates could emerge functionally unable to read deeply, argue clearly, or write independently. That means the old shortcut of “degree = competence” gets weaker, and proof of real skill becomes more important than ever.
It normalizes outsourcing your own mind - Using AI as a brainstorming partner is one thing, but using it as your primary brain for every essay, idea, and decision slowly trains you to avoid mental effort. Over years this can shrink your confidence and capacity to tackle hard problems on your own.
Working class students are hit hardest - For first gen or low income students, university is often the family’s big bet on upward mobility. If their education quietly downgrades into “AI assisted credential collection,” they lose the deep skills that could have actually changed their economic trajectory.
It shifts power to a handful of tech platforms - When core teaching, learning, and assessment get routed through a few corporate AI tools, those companies effectively become gatekeepers of how people learn. That raises real questions about dependence, values, and who ultimately benefits from the system.

🏢 What This Means for Businesses

Portfolios beat diplomas - If degrees are increasingly easy to “fake” with AI, smart employers and clients will care more about real work, writing samples, case studies, and live problem solving. For you as a creator or solopreneur, that is good news. Clear proof of your own thinking becomes a huge differentiator.
Your real edge is how you think, not which tools you use - Everyone can access the same AI models. The people who win are those who still know how to research, synthesize, and make judgments, then use AI as acceleration rather than substitution. If you keep training your mind, you stay valuable even as tools change.
Trust and authenticity become premium assets - As more content is AI written, your ability to show “this is actually me thinking” becomes a brand advantage. Behind the scenes you might collaborate with AI, but the market will reward transparent, grounded perspectives that clearly reflect a human brain at work.
There is opportunity to build “real learning” alternatives - If traditional institutions drift into shallow, AI padded education, it opens space for courses, communities, and programs that are explicitly about rigorous thinking with AI as a co pilot. Cohorts that require real work, real feedback, and visible outcomes will stand out and can command higher trust and prices.

🔚 The Bottom Line

This essay is not really about whether AI is good or bad. It is about what happens when an already stressed, corporatized education system seizes on AI as a shortcut instead of a support. For individuals and small businesses, the takeaway is simple. Keep AI in the “co pilot” seat and fiercely protect your own capacity to think, write, and decide. That combination is going to age far better than either pure “human only” romanticism or “let the model do everything” laziness.

💬 Your Take

If more universities quietly slide into “AI in, degree out” mode, how do you plan to prove and keep sharpening your own real skills in a world where almost anyone can manufacture good looking work with a prompt? 🤔

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