Today, economic pressures have prompted the C.S.U. to redefine what it means to train useful workers. In December 2024, Newsom\u2019s office encouraged the C.S.U. system to create the A.I. Workforce Acceleration Board, which would \u201cguide the equitable development of a highly skilled, diverse work force that can drive California\u2019s A.I.-powered economy.\u201d In January, the C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI, and C.S.U.\u2019s chancellor, Mildred Garc\u00eda, 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\u2019s model that responds to \u201crapidly changing work force needs, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence.\u201d The statewide push to incorporate A.I. into every level of education is an integral part of this plan.<\/p>\n
A.I. tools were rolled out across the C.S.U. system late last spring, right as students and faculty were preparing for finals. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know it was coming,\u201d says Andrew Taylor Scott, a machine-learning researcher and lecturer at San Francisco State University. The university didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s guidance; some refused on principle to incorporate A.I. into their teaching at all.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWhat is historical materialism?\u201d he says. \u201cNo one is knocking on my door to ask me that.\u201d 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 \u00c9mile Durkheim. If Max Weber, the person, once wrote that universities existed to produce \u201cconvivial capitalists,\u201d Janos hoped that Max Weber, the bot, might have something like the opposite effect.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cTell me about your theory of exploitation under capitalism.\u201d The chatbot responded almost instantaneously, in conspicuously crisp prose. \u201cAh, welcome, comrade,\u201d it responded. \u201cIn my critique of capitalism, the theory of exploitation is central. \u2026 The worker, who has no property of their own, must sell their labor power \u2014 their capacity to work \u2014 in order to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, economic pressures have prompted the C.S.U. to redefine what it means to train useful workers. In December…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2080,7,9,8,4228,109597,12137,3310,3290],"class_list":["post-360654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-colleges-and-universities","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-gavin","tag-innovation","tag-newsom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}