Today, economic pressures have prompted the C.S.U. to redefine what it means to train useful workers. In December 2024, Newsom’s office encouraged the C.S.U. system to create the A.I. Workforce Acceleration Board, which would “guide the equitable development of a highly skilled, diverse work force that can drive California’s A.I.-powered economy.” In January, the C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI, and C.S.U.’s chancellor, Mildred García, announced both developments as flagship elements of the A.I. Initiative at a news conference shortly afterward. In April, Newsom released a new Master Plan for Career Education, a revision of Kerr’s model that responds to “rapidly changing work force needs, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence.” The statewide push to incorporate A.I. into every level of education is an integral part of this plan.
A.I. tools were rolled out across the C.S.U. system late last spring, right as students and faculty were preparing for finals. “We didn’t know it was coming,” says Andrew Taylor Scott, a machine-learning researcher and lecturer at San Francisco State University. The university didn’t explicitly mandate that teachers use A.I. in the classroom, but the message was clear: Refusing to integrate A.I. into their courses was to swim against the current.
To make matters worse, the A.I. Initiative coincided with a $2.3 billion deficit that resulted in mass layoffs of tenured faculty, the shuttering of entire academic departments and a 6 percent tuition increase. In that context, many professors felt pressure to adopt for fear of losing their jobs. Classroom by classroom, they were left to figure out how to adapt. Some embraced the chancellor’s guidance; some refused on principle to incorporate A.I. into their teaching at all.
Some were ahead of the curve. In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, Janos noticed that his students, most of whom are remote learners, seemed even more reticent to speak up in class, let alone request office-hours appointments. “What is historical materialism?” he says. “No one is knocking on my door to ask me that.” When ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, he found himself wondering if this could be one way to help them ask questions and engage with philosophy more directly. So he started tinkering with it, eventually using ChatGPT to create chatbots that imitate three major thinkers in his field: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. If Max Weber, the person, once wrote that universities existed to produce “convivial capitalists,” Janos hoped that Max Weber, the bot, might have something like the opposite effect.
When Janos realized that he needed to adapt all of his courses to include A.I., he called on those chatbots as a teaching tool. He also reduced the number of writing assignments longer than a paragraph and developed ones that required students to hand in their A.I. chat logs instead. One summer afternoon, he let me observe how one of the bots, MarxGPT, works in practice. I watched as he pulled the chat window up on his screen and typed in a simple prompt: “Tell me about your theory of exploitation under capitalism.” The chatbot responded almost instantaneously, in conspicuously crisp prose. “Ah, welcome, comrade,” it responded. “In my critique of capitalism, the theory of exploitation is central. … The worker, who has no property of their own, must sell their labor power — their capacity to work — in order to survive.”