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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. Universities are racing to embrace AI. AI tutors, AI graders, AI feedback, basically artificial intelligence, everything. But what if replacing professors with chatbots doesn't make education smarter and better? It just makes the whole system a little bit...
full of BS, enter BS University. I am here with philosophy professor at Monash University in Australia, Robert Sparrow, who's written a paper that has an amazing name. It has the word BS in it about this whole topic.
Chapter 2: How are universities embracing AI in education?
Robert, welcome to the show. G'day. So, let's start here. Your paper has one of the most delightfully blunt academic titles I've ever seen, BS University. Before we get into the argument, what is the BS we're talking about here? Is it the AI? Is it the hype? Is it the direction universities are going?
It's actually the status of the outputs of AI.
Chapter 3: What concerns arise from replacing professors with AI?
BS has become a technical term in philosophy following quite a famous book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, which I think was entitled On BS. That's obviously not the proper title, but for the sake of people's delicate ears, we'll use that expression. Frankfurt talks about BS as a particular type of speech that that is uttered without regard for the truth.
He's distinguishing it here from ordinary speech, where we try to communicate with each other by saying true things, telling each other the truth. You assume that I'm telling you the truth in general. Of course, liars are also oriented towards the truth, but they're trying to deceive you. They care about the truth, but they're trying to lead you away from the truth.
The BS artist is someone who doesn't care about the truth at all and is just trying to get you to react in the way they want you to react. So they're often just trying to get a rise or troll you, or maybe they're just trying to entertain you, but they don't care about the truth at all. And that turns out to be exactly what's going on with AI. These machines don't care about the truth.
They can't care about anything at all. They're often not connected to the world. They're only connected to the internet, which is a different thing. And they're trained to generate a certain reaction from the human brain. the human user, typically a thumbs up reaction. So these are deeply BS machines.
They don't care about the truth at all, which is why putting them at the heart of the modern university is such a terrible idea.
to ascribe a want to it or something that they're trying to do i suppose it's just put money in the ai company's pockets or do whatever its authors want it to do i know that's not quite what they're doing but if we had to guess some motive there for their answers and why they output bs would that be the reason
I mean, the reason why they output BS is because they're not creatures in the world. They're not connected to the world. They're not sentient. They don't care about anything. They can't care about the truth.
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Chapter 4: What does 'BS' mean in the context of education?
I mean, people design AI to do different things, but they're all designed to generate a reaction in the user. They're all trained. They might be designed, as you say, to make money, sell advertisements, maintain user engagement, but fundamentally, they want you to respond to them in a certain way, and that's what they care about. They don't really care about that either, but that's
But the designers are the designers. Yeah, that's what the designers have designed them to do. So sometimes they are designed to give us information that is accurate. And so people have been trained to give them a little thumbs up, reward them when they say true things. But it's the reward that they're oriented towards, not the truth.
Now, caring about something that is true or producing text that sounds convincing, there's a difference between these two things. And to me, I would argue that's a very important difference when it comes to the educational setting. But maybe convince me a little bit there.
So I do think this is very important in the educational system. I think universities are institutions that are fundamentally oriented towards the production of knowledge. I mean, also hopefully produce other benefits for the community, but universities need to care about the truth and the people teaching and researching in universities need to care about the truth.
And so you can't replace them with machines that don't care about the truth. There's also a question of responsibility here. If I lie to you, you hold me responsible for that. Sometimes you'll punish me. You'll certainly think worse of me. And I am the kind of creature that can accept responsibility for what I say. The machines can't and don't. They're not moral agents.
They can't be held responsible for things. And again, that makes them very dangerous if you're relying on them because they are not the kind of things that when they get it wrong, they don't have skin in the game, you might say.
An analogy there might be when an autonomous AI vehicle hurts someone, like we're not throwing the driver in jail for reckless driving. Let me jump to this other dystopian scenario.
So if machines are teaching and grading students in the near future, and then students are using those same machines to basically write, plagiarize, generate their assignments, and then those assignments are then being graded by the machines, like it's a garbage in, garbage out, and then the garbage out goes back to the garbage in.
Is this where academia might be going if we allow AI professors into the classroom? Absolutely.
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