Learning in the Age of AI
We are ending the academic year with the feeling that the ground beneath our feet has disappeared. What is the value of learning when you can generate an essay that sounds good in thirty seconds? Next year, we cannot simply update the course content. Bold changes are needed to address the challenges posed by the omnipresence of generative AI in students’ lives.
The assessment system is obsolete. It is a textbook incentive problem. The students themselves say it plainly: if they make an effort and do not use AI in their assignments, they receive lower grades than classmates who do use it.
Faced with this situation, I began to value imperfection. A poorly constructed sentence or a half-formed but genuinely considered idea is worth more than a flawless paragraph that, I am sorry to say, I now doubt is really theirs. Teaching is my vocation, but I have suddenly become a detective searching for traces of humanity in the assignments I grade. And that leaves me with an immense sense of emptiness. Is this really the best we can offer?
Article by Liliana Arroyo, director of the Chair for Socially Responsible Digital Innovation, SoReDI, and professor and researcher in Esade’s Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability, published in the newspaper Ara.