College Kids Don’t Want Your AI
The unique threat artificial intelligence poses to students’ education and their hopes of someday landing a job has made the university a powerful crucible for anti-AI resistance.
An anti-AI demonstration outside Columbia University on May 12.
Photographer: Bing Guan for Bloomberg BusinessweekOfficials at the University of South Carolina have described the $1.5 million partnership it signed last summer with OpenAI as a path toward smarter research, better time management and around-the-clock learning support. Undergrad Brooklyn Tyner sees it another way. “We’re not excited to see these advancements in AI if it means it’s going to pollute our environment, spread misinformation, track us and take our jobs,” says Tyner, 20, who calls OpenAI’s ChatGPT a “cheating machine.”
This spring, when the university organized its first ever “AI Day” to bring leaders in artificial intelligence from Microsoft Corp. and Gartner Inc. to campus, Tyner set up a booth outside the event. On a big whiteboard, she asked each passerby whether they approved of the OpenAI partnership. By a margin of 9-to-1, she says, those who stopped to cast their vote with a dry-erase marker said they did not. “The people who decide we’re going to give this much money to ChatGPT are not the people who interact with students every day,” she says.