AI is devastating higher education, but the system was already broken
If you work at a university today, you talk a lot with the dead. I don’t mean that as a metaphor – or, at least, not entirely.
Generative AI trains on people. Its algorithms learn from humans, requiring our quirks and idiosyncrasies to improve. If the models are exposed predominantly to the output from other AIs, they degenerate and, eventually, collapse.
That explains a strange new trend reported by antiquarian booksellers, who told the Guardian of bulk orders for old stock, originating, they thought, from AI companies or their surrogates. The titles were bafflingly esoteric: one bibliophile described a purchase that included a manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s, a book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, and a copy of Early Australian Poetry.
But for AI trainers, the subjects don’t necessarily matter. Back in the day, the companies vacuumed up human content from Reddit, Wikipedia and similar sites. With data now prohibitively expensive, remaindered books provide an attractive option for “destructive scanning”, in which machines slice apart bindings to feed on the creativity contained therein.
As an academic, you encounter the process at the opposite end. When you open Speed Grader to confront another bland but competent assignment, suspiciously devoid of grammatical or spelling errors, your heart sinks. You know that, in all probability, the document you’re reading was composed not by your student (whose contribution likely extended no further than dropping the essay question into Claude’s interface and adding “make it sound human”), but by a legion of absent (and, quite probably, deceased) authors, whose forgotten texts enabled an algorithm to stitch together an essay that is at least passable and often reasonably good.
