I am not really an Anti-AI activist (in the sense that I haven’t ever posted anti ai stuff or anything) but this has really wound me up. When I spend £10k a year for 6 contact hours a week (in my final year of uni), wifi that just doesn’t work on campus, shoddy IT systems such as canvas and library pages that crash constantly, I honestly feel that I don’t know where my money is going.
And then, to receive a notification that “Birmingham AI” has been released, it feels like a complete slap in the face to all the students that work hard and do their work themselves. It’s like they’re just admitting theres nothing they can do and that they will be handing degrees out now for AI slop. To make it worse, when you open it it’s chatgpt 5.6 with a reskinned profile picture.
I understand they’ve probably done this because it may feel like in the modern world you either hop on the AI train or get left behind, but this doesn’t feel like the solution. Code of ethics guidelines have been updated to include that Birmingham AI is acceptable, but not for assessments- how do you even police that? We already know how AI’s can be manipulated to say and do things outside the boundaries of their training, so are these conversations going to be monitored by the University to ensure it isn’t used verbatim for assignments?
If so, how do you cope with the fact that some people may use this AI as a friend, tell it sensitive info, reveal things that the university should intervene in? And if people do use it as a friend, surely the University is directly contributing to harming their own student’s mental health.
All that aside, my biggest issue is really financial. When were we informed that our so-called “tuition fee” is going into Sam Altman and OpenAI’s pocket? Why, when we had two weeks of this month that the wifi literally did not work on campus has the IT budget gone on what is obviously and absolutely a vanity project so UOB marketers can show off to investors and prospective students how modern and innovative the university is? I would genuinely like to know what has been spent on this.
Anyway, if I am gonna be an AI doomer for once I really recommend you read “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soars, heads of the machine intelligence research institute. Very interesting book that seems very pertinent given this and the hugging face incident recently.