Netflix has romanticised academia. This is what it's really like
Stephen is finding it harder to enjoy his teaching. Class sizes continue to rise, the administrative load has increased, and there is an expectation that staff are available 24/7 via email, whenever the student needs them. Attrition rates among domestic students are stubbornly high (around 30 per cent). With the increased enrolment numbers, it is inevitable that many students have turned up for the wrong reasons and end up regretting their choice.
A large proportion of Stephen's undergraduate students, and a majority of those in the graduate classes, are international students, and many of them have inadequate command of English. It is not uncommon for students to use a translation app in class to understand what is being said. In the large undergraduate classes, which are offered online as well as in person, attendance can be poor. One of Stephen's classes has 200 students enrolled but on occasion he has fronted up to find as few as 10 in attendance. The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on written assignments has increased dramatically. In the last assignment Stephen marked, he estimated that something like 75 per cent of the class were covertly using ChatGPT to write their essays.
As a consequence of all of these influences, the teaching experience is becoming increasingly unsatisfying. So Stephen has decided to make a move. He has been invited to apply for a position in a prestigious research institute in Europe (there are no equivalent institutes in Australia), and that is where he sees his future.
Finally, let's see how things look for James, who is at the other end of his career. James is the head of a social sciences school in a metropolitan 1970s-era campus. He has been a head of school for three years, as part of a five-year term. He had a solid but not stellar research career previously, and is a successful and popular teacher. The skill sets he developed as a researcher and as a teacher are of limited use to him in this management role, either in dealing with his own staff or in 'managing up' with more senior administrators.
James has responsibility for managing a permanent academic staff of 25, a support staff of six, and a fluctuating number of casual sessional teachers, and he must be available, in theory, to every one of the 2000 students enrolled in the school's courses. The shift into administration was not something he particularly desired. As a senior member of a school with a rotating elected headship, it was simply his turn to take on this responsibility. It is disappointing for him that now he has little time for his own research and has difficulty fitting in even the small amount of teaching he has been keen to retain. At least he has been able to continue supervising some of his graduate students.
The budget for James's school has been subject to successive cuts that have impacted his capacity to make the appointments he needs to service the course offerings. Even when staff have resigned and moved elsewhere (and this is now happening a lot), it has been difficult to secure approval to make a replacement appointment when the required 'business case' demands projections of sustained levels of enrolments and secure funding. As a result, even though the enrolment figures have been relatively stable, his staff numbers have shrunk. Reluctantly, and notwithstanding his sensitivity to the exploitative nature of casual appointments, he has made numerous casual appointments to fill the gaps so he can at least put someone in front of the classes.
While James has almost no control over the size of his budget, he is regularly criticised by members of his staff for not doing better at generating funds for the school. At the same time, there is pressure from above on a range of institutional imperatives. Even though many of his staff are not likely to be competitive in pursuing ARC grants in the present circumstances, for instance, his superiors insist that he require them to submit applications nonetheless. James agrees to do this, but in some cases, he actually just doesn't bother.
James's situation is typical of heads of school across the university in that they are being squeezed from both sides. They are the target of criticism from their own staff for the consequences of their underfunding as well as pressure from above to do more with the less that is given. It is a thankless and stressful role, with very little opportunity to make things better for staff. If he doesn't burn out along the way, James intends to serve out his term, take his accrued long service leave, and then move as quickly as possible towards an early retirement.
In each of these snapshots, the academic staff member has done everything that has been asked of them to become a productive contributor to the sector. But none of them can see a future for themselves within the contemporary Australian higher education system. What I have tried to highlight here is precisely the lack of hope in the future, the sense of resignation in response to institutional change they have no capacity to reverse, that is now firmly embedded in the sector's workforce. It carries disturbing implications for the future of our higher education system.
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This system is more than just an industry. It is a central location for the production, preservation and dissemination of knowledge, for the maintenance and investigation of a cultural heritage, and for the building of a civil society. As the Australian university has increasingly emulated what it thinks of as the practices of commercial business enterprises, it has distanced itself from these kinds of purpose. Along the way, it has also distanced itself from the ideals, capacities and aspirations of many of its academic staff. They are left without a home, forced to find ways to do what both Peter Fleming and Hannah Forsyth, riffing on Bill Reading's classic 1996 critique, The University in Ruins, have described as 'dwelling in the ruins'.
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ABC News
14 hours ago
- ABC News
Why your AI questions are a power and water drain
Sam Hawley: How often do you use AI? It's becoming part of our everyday lives. But when you pump in a question into something like ChatGPT, do you ever think about the energy it uses? Today, Gordon Noble from the Institute of Sustainable Futures at UTS on the data centres driving AI and what they're doing to the climate. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. So Gordon, Googling something or typing a question into ChatGPT, it is so easy and simple for us and very, very useful, of course. But we don't really stop to think about where all that information is coming from, do we? Gordon Noble: Yeah, that's right. And I think this is crept up on us. When you do a search now with all these AI tools, ChatGPT being one of them, they can be 10 times more energy consuming than, for instance, doing a Google search. And what sits behind that is this massive investment that we've seen in data centres globally. So it's absolutely exploded. Sam Hawley: Yeah, okay. So we're not thinking about these data centres when we're typing in what we want to know from ChatGPT. And most of us would never have seen one or been in one. What do they look like? Where are they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, it's a really good question. So data centres, just to put it in visual terms, so the average size of what they call these hyperscale data centres, so they're around about 10,000 square feet. To give you an indication, a Bunnings store is about 8,000 square feet. So they're kind of just big sheds, right? Huge. But what we're seeing now is that we're moving to not just these Bunnings-like sheds, if you like, but we're moving to these massive million square data centres, almost campuses of data centres. Around the world, there are around about 1,100 of these hyperscale data centres. In Sydney, for instance, Sydney is a big centre for data centres here in Australia. We have over 85 data centres. One of the reasons Sydney is such an attractive place for data centres is we have 12 submarine cables that come out of Sydney and basically connect us to the rest of the world. So data centres globally are now around about 1.5% of global energy consumption. The question is what's going to happen in the future? Sam Hawley: Okay, so Gordon, let's delve a bit further into how these data centres actually work, because while they're enabling us to inform ourselves at lightning speed, they're also using a huge amount of power, massive amount. Gordon Noble: So roughly at the moment, global energy consumption coming out of data centres is around 1.5% of all the global electricity. The issue is that data centres are highly concentrated. So it's in places in the world, the US, parts of Europe, Ireland is a massive data centre hub, where they're actually causing strain on the energy grid because of how much the energy growth has been. So to give you an idea in Australia, so a research report from Morgan and Stanley, they were projecting that roughly at the moment, data centre energy consumption from the grid is around about 5% of all of our energy consumption. But what they're projecting is that this could grow to between 8% and 15% of all of our electricity consumption here in Australia, depending on some of the decisions that are made as in how much we use AI tools. So what the International Energy Agency is now saying is that by 2030, the energy consumption from data centres will be the size of Japan. So we're talking massive amounts of increase in energy consumption. That's placing strains on the grid, but it's also placing a shift in terms of how the energies come from. So for instance, in the US, we're seeing providers like Microsoft, who are big data centre operators because of the tools that they've got. They're looking to shift to nuclear. And one of the things they're looking to do is to reopen Three Mile Island, which is the nuclear plant that had been mothballed to basically take all that energy from a reopened Three Mile Island. So lots and lots of decisions as a result of this. Sam Hawley: Why is it, Gordon, that AI takes so much more energy than just Googling? Gordon Noble: These large language models are effectively trained to look at the whole of the internet, right? So when they're developing these models, they're actually looking at everything in the internet. And then when we ask it to do something, it's churning away from all that work that it's done. Lots and lots of different applications, but I think that common common thread is that it's aggregating across a lot of data rather than just that single data search where it goes to a single source. Sam Hawley: Do we have a sense already about the sort of strain that it's putting on electricity grids in Australia? Gordon Noble: Yeah, so at the moment, that's one of the questions. And we don't really have, I think, a good picture of the national demand, right? So the issue at the moment is a lot of the training of these AI tools, they've taken place in the US principally. So they haven't yet really been here in Australia. So that's going to be one of the questions as we increase the size of our data centre industry. Where is it going to start to have implications in terms of energy demand? Will it be, for instance, in Sydney, which is really our data centre capital? What would the impact, if you like, in terms of energy consumption in New South Wales in particular? Other states have the same issue, but because Sydney really is that capital of data centres in Australia, that's where some of the key issues will emerge. Sam Hawley: And Gordon, every time we use an AI site like ChatGPT, it uses a lot of water, doesn't it? Gordon Noble: Yeah, look, this is a real sleeper issue, and it's one that we're very concerned with. There's recent research, for instance, that since 2022, all the new data centres that have been developed, you know, two thirds of them are in areas where there's water stress. So it's becoming a big issue. But the way to think about data centres is that they're like the human body, they like to be kept cool, operate efficiently. And one of the ways that that happens is using water. So they consume literally billions of litres of water. The issue as we go forward is how do we actually, in Australia, build a data centre industry that is sustainable, given that we're an arid continent, given that we're going to have challenges from our climate in terms of water. At the moment, one of the opportunities is that both in Sydney and Melbourne, where data centres are going to likely be established, is we actually have surplus water in the form of recycled water. We tip 97% of our recycled water out in Sydney and Melbourne, we actually tip it out into our oceans and bays. So this is an asset, for instance, that could be used if we're smart enough to say, well, how can we actually build, say pipelines of recycled water to use this water, so we're not actually putting stress, environmental stress, on our rivers and creeks and streams, etc. So there's opportunities around this that we could solve. Sam Hawley: This is all making me start to feel rather bad for using ChatGPT for that recipe last night. I must go back to the old book, the cookbook lives on. Anyway, just tell me about emissions then, because we're meant to be bringing them down and I'm gathering this is not helping. Even the tech companies admit that, don't they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, this is what happened last year. So I think the surprise to the market is we started having the sustainability reports of the big tech companies and they all started to actually reveal how much their emissions had started to increase over the last four or five years. Each one of them, there are different increases in emissions depending on the way they've structured their operations, whether they build data centres, whether they outsource them, etc. But the picture that was emerging was a very consistent increase in their energy consumption. I think that really woke up a lot of the market in terms of, yeah, this is actually an energy intensive industry. Up until at that time, I think there was a little bit of a lack of understanding of how much energy data centres were creating because it wasn't really being aggregated in a single spot. So as we've been getting what we call these climate related financial disclosures and companies are starting to report on what we call the scope one, two and three emissions, we're starting to get a bigger picture. We're expecting to get more reporting in the next month or so. So what we'll start to see is what's happened since 2024 and 2025 and then we'll start to really have a good understanding of where things go forward. But what the clear picture at the moment is emissions arising in the big tech companies driven by their investments in AI. Sam Hawley: Gosh, all right. So Gordon, how worried do you think we should be then about this massive energy use and who should actually be taking responsibility for this? Gordon Noble: You know, I think it's as you mentioned, there's a lot of potential benefits around AI tools. You know, we can use these, for instance, for whether it's the recipe, a lot of environmental applications, a lot of benefits here if we get this right. At the moment from an Australian perspective, what really we haven't seen is a national approach being taken on this. We have, I think, in the Australian government an approach to communications that goes back to the, you know, the days in the early Federation we had a postmaster general. At the moment we need to start to think of, you know, the digital economy as actually moving across a range of different portfolios in the federal government, for instance. So we need a strategy around this to recognise that this has potentially got massive benefits, but also we really need to manage that. What we're seeing in other jurisdictions, for instance, Singapore, have gone down the pathway of establishing a green data centre roadmap. We need something like that in Australia. Sam Hawley: But what do you think without a new approach, can we keep pumping these questions into ChatGPT and still reach our environmental goals? And can our energy system actually cope with demand that is just going to keep growing? Gordon Noble: This is the big question. So the reality is if we do have at the higher end of expectations of the growth of AI, the energy that's demanded here just in Australia will actually crowd out other investments that we're making in renewable energy. So whilst we're making progress in decarbonising our grid, you know, there's an assumption that's based on, you know, a certain level of growth of energy demand. If that increases significantly, you start to put pressure on how much we can actually invest in more renewables, in more solar, for instance, more battery technology. It starts to then have that question, do we keep coal-fired power stations longer than we need? So I think there's a broader set of issues that we really need to get our heads around. Sam Hawley: Gordon Noble is a Research Director with the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. I'm going to take some leave from now for a couple of weeks. Sydney Pead will be with you from tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Netflix has romanticised academia. This is what it's really like
Stephen is finding it harder to enjoy his teaching. Class sizes continue to rise, the administrative load has increased, and there is an expectation that staff are available 24/7 via email, whenever the student needs them. Attrition rates among domestic students are stubbornly high (around 30 per cent). With the increased enrolment numbers, it is inevitable that many students have turned up for the wrong reasons and end up regretting their choice. A large proportion of Stephen's undergraduate students, and a majority of those in the graduate classes, are international students, and many of them have inadequate command of English. It is not uncommon for students to use a translation app in class to understand what is being said. In the large undergraduate classes, which are offered online as well as in person, attendance can be poor. One of Stephen's classes has 200 students enrolled but on occasion he has fronted up to find as few as 10 in attendance. The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on written assignments has increased dramatically. In the last assignment Stephen marked, he estimated that something like 75 per cent of the class were covertly using ChatGPT to write their essays. As a consequence of all of these influences, the teaching experience is becoming increasingly unsatisfying. So Stephen has decided to make a move. He has been invited to apply for a position in a prestigious research institute in Europe (there are no equivalent institutes in Australia), and that is where he sees his future. Finally, let's see how things look for James, who is at the other end of his career. James is the head of a social sciences school in a metropolitan 1970s-era campus. He has been a head of school for three years, as part of a five-year term. He had a solid but not stellar research career previously, and is a successful and popular teacher. The skill sets he developed as a researcher and as a teacher are of limited use to him in this management role, either in dealing with his own staff or in 'managing up' with more senior administrators. James has responsibility for managing a permanent academic staff of 25, a support staff of six, and a fluctuating number of casual sessional teachers, and he must be available, in theory, to every one of the 2000 students enrolled in the school's courses. The shift into administration was not something he particularly desired. As a senior member of a school with a rotating elected headship, it was simply his turn to take on this responsibility. It is disappointing for him that now he has little time for his own research and has difficulty fitting in even the small amount of teaching he has been keen to retain. At least he has been able to continue supervising some of his graduate students. The budget for James's school has been subject to successive cuts that have impacted his capacity to make the appointments he needs to service the course offerings. Even when staff have resigned and moved elsewhere (and this is now happening a lot), it has been difficult to secure approval to make a replacement appointment when the required 'business case' demands projections of sustained levels of enrolments and secure funding. As a result, even though the enrolment figures have been relatively stable, his staff numbers have shrunk. Reluctantly, and notwithstanding his sensitivity to the exploitative nature of casual appointments, he has made numerous casual appointments to fill the gaps so he can at least put someone in front of the classes. While James has almost no control over the size of his budget, he is regularly criticised by members of his staff for not doing better at generating funds for the school. At the same time, there is pressure from above on a range of institutional imperatives. Even though many of his staff are not likely to be competitive in pursuing ARC grants in the present circumstances, for instance, his superiors insist that he require them to submit applications nonetheless. James agrees to do this, but in some cases, he actually just doesn't bother. James's situation is typical of heads of school across the university in that they are being squeezed from both sides. They are the target of criticism from their own staff for the consequences of their underfunding as well as pressure from above to do more with the less that is given. It is a thankless and stressful role, with very little opportunity to make things better for staff. If he doesn't burn out along the way, James intends to serve out his term, take his accrued long service leave, and then move as quickly as possible towards an early retirement. In each of these snapshots, the academic staff member has done everything that has been asked of them to become a productive contributor to the sector. But none of them can see a future for themselves within the contemporary Australian higher education system. What I have tried to highlight here is precisely the lack of hope in the future, the sense of resignation in response to institutional change they have no capacity to reverse, that is now firmly embedded in the sector's workforce. It carries disturbing implications for the future of our higher education system. Loading This system is more than just an industry. It is a central location for the production, preservation and dissemination of knowledge, for the maintenance and investigation of a cultural heritage, and for the building of a civil society. As the Australian university has increasingly emulated what it thinks of as the practices of commercial business enterprises, it has distanced itself from these kinds of purpose. Along the way, it has also distanced itself from the ideals, capacities and aspirations of many of its academic staff. They are left without a home, forced to find ways to do what both Peter Fleming and Hannah Forsyth, riffing on Bill Reading's classic 1996 critique, The University in Ruins, have described as 'dwelling in the ruins'.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
AI doll M3GAN grows up for this campy techno thriller sequel
M3GAN 2.0 ★★★ M, 119 minutes Conspiracy theorists might make something of the fact that M3GAN, a film about a sinister artificially intelligent talking doll, had its US premiere in December 2022, a week or so after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public. Since then, AI fatigue has set in to the point where the prudent choice for filmmakers would be to avoid the subject altogether, especially as M3GAN 's real-life equivalents don't threaten to take over the world so much as drown us in a sea of cliches. But a hit is a hit, and so Gerard Johnstone, the talented New Zealand director of the original, is back for another round with the clumsily titled M3GAN 2.0, this time working from his own script, even if this isn't the version of Hollywood success he might have mapped out for himself in his dreams. Voiced by YouTube personality Jenna Davis and embodied by the young dancer Amie Donald in an animatronic mask, M3GAN started out as a caramel-haired waif about the same size as her orphaned eight-year-old owner Cady (Violet McGraw), but with considerably more adult poise. Since her body was destroyed at the end of the first film, for a while she's reduced to a ghost in the machine, haunting Cady's aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), the tightly-wound roboticist who came up with the idea for a high-tech doll in the first place. Before long M3GAN is back on the earthly plane in a new form – but the changes aren't just physical. In the first film, she was a classic case of good intentions gone wrong, programmed to keep Cady safe at all costs, and racking up a significant kill count in the process. Somewhere along the line, though, Johnstone or his overseers have decided that a cool-eyed, stylish, outwardly demure killing machine prone to quips such as 'Hang onto your vaginas' is simply too fabulous to be treated as a simple villain.
