College Says Every Student Is Now Required to Use AI
We hope your eyeballs are nice and lubricated, because prepare for them to do some major rolling, courtesy of this zinger by the institution's executive vice president and provost, Ravi Bellamkonda.
"Through AI Fluency, Ohio State students will be 'bilingual' — fluent in both their major field of study and the application of AI in that area," Bellamkonda said in a statement. "Grounded with a strong sense of responsibility and possibility, we will prepare Ohio State's students to harness the power of AI and to lead in shaping its future of their area of study."
You heard that right. Ohio State isn't capitulating to the tech industry — it's benevolently teaching "AI Fluency" to prepare its bright-eyed pupils for a world in which typing "can you do my homework please?" into ChatGPT is somehow an indication of resourcefulness.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Large language models have become incredibly popular with lazy students — much to the chagrin of their professors, if they aren't using chatbots themselves — and many universities have already partnered with tech firms to integrate the latest AI tools. Duke University, for example, just began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, along with its own "DukeGPT" tool.
Students are supposedly pretty enthused that they've been given the green light to use AI in class. We wonder why.
"A student walked up to me after turning in the first batch of AI-assisted papers and thanked me for such a fun assignment," said Steven Brown, an associate professor in OSU's department of philosophy who's already using AI in his classes, as quoted by NBC4. "And then when I graded them and found a lot of really creative ideas. My favorite one is still a paper on karma and the practice of returning shopping carts."
By his own admission, Brown encourages students "to write papers using AI however they'd like," including an exercise using AI to create Platonic dialogs between two people taking opposing viewpoints on a controversial topic, which helps "them understand how intelligent and thoughtful parties might disagree about that issue."
Brown added that banning AI in class is "shortsighted."
"It would be a disaster for our students to have no idea how to effectively use one of the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created," Brown said, per NBC4. "AI is such a powerful tool for self-education, that we must rapidly adapt our pedagogy or be left in the dust."
This is an incredible claim to make, because "AI" — a catch-all marketing buzzword, let's not forget — is still plagued by factual hallucinations. As in, the tool that Brown is having his students learn stuff with gets the facts wrong all the time, lacking the expertise in a particular field that someone like Brown has. The tech's rapid adoption also means there's little long-term evidence of its benefits in education — whereas there's plenty of worrying signs to the contrary, with multiple studies linking ChatGPT use with plummeting grades, memory loss, and diminished critical thinking skills.
But Ohio State, along with many other institutions, are rushing to adopt AI anyway. Starting in the Fall 2025 semester, OSU students will now have to take a mandatory AI skills seminar, tailored to each field of study. As an example OSU provided to NBC4, education majors could be asked to use AI to create a lesson plan, which they'd then evaluate and revise. Then they'd write a reflection — every student's favorite — on their AI usage.
Maybe some students could benefit from learning about the downsides of AI from these courses. But on the whole, university policies like these could foster a climate where AI usage is not just openly acceptable but desirable, having students believe they're being empowered by some all-knowing sci-fi tech, when in reality it's still very experimental with a future that is anything but certain.
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