December 9, 2022 - 1:00pm
The threat Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to white-collar professions seemed to escalate earlier this week as ChatGPT, a text-generating AI crafted by an Elon Musk-founded company, expanded on bot capabilities which two years ago wrote an op-ed for the Guardian. It is not just journalists under threat, however: academics recounted on Twitter how they fed exam questions into the chatbot, prompting it to produce answers that would merit decent marks, and which would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from work submitted by a student.
Having signed up to test the software myself, I would assess its output roughly at the level of Zoe Williams, or maybe at a push Owen Jones – it is not yet quite at the level of a Polly Toynbee. Yet if ChatGPT only threatened the jobs of Guardian op-ed writers and the increasingly prolific essay mills that produce undergraduate essays to order, there would be little to worry about. What is more worrying about ChatGPT is what it tells us about the degraded state of academic teaching and the orthodoxies that dominate its hallowed corridors.
Some researchers have already identified the latent political bias of ChatGPT, with its ‘opinions’ clearly lying on the progressive political Left, reflecting what a sanitised Internet policed by content moderators and hate speech laws looks like. That culling bien-pensant opinion from the web would be indistinguishable from the work of undergraduates indicates not only the general lack of original or independent thinking in universities, but also the actual process of education itself.
Long before ChatGPT, academics have been happily collaborating in a management-led process of steadily automating education. We record and upload lectures, agree to provide hand-outs with every session, and provide multiple lecture slides with gobbets of information delivered by an endless list of bullet points.
Often, we are even required to directly provide individual items of readings with the reading list, presumably in order to save the students the trouble of having to go to the (online) library in order to download the material themselves, and risk perhaps stumbling across another possibly relevant and interesting item to read. Here, the lecturer is already reduced to being the increasingly redundant and generic adjunct for an automated system of online provision — and this is without even mentioning the ever-more censorious and dogmatic atmosphere on many campuses.
That ChatGPT would blow apart university assessment reflects marking processes that are increasingly weighted toward coursework in place of more demanding and stressful exams. Many universities offer students several resubmission opportunities should they fail. That is to say nothing of the increasing reliance on multiple choice quizzes that are already marked automatically, or the mania in the humanities and social sciences for alternative forms of assessment.
Needless to say, all these degraded and degrading trends were exacerbated during lockdown, when many academics willingly embraced wholesale the technologies of distance learning. Despite the fact that most undergraduates were in the demographic cohort least susceptible to Covid-19, the academics’ union UCU irresponsibly claimed that universities would become the next ‘care homes’ of the pandemic and that scrapping in-person teaching was a ‘victory’.
Who needs Elon Musk when we have UCU? Academics’ enthusiastic embrace of lockdown reflected a profession that sees little to no value in education as an inter-personal relationship. These corrosive trends are set to continue: Oxford University’s Hertford College says that entrance interviews this year will be conducted online only.
In due course, perhaps the Oxbridge interviewer will also be replaced by a chatbot that can be relied upon not to stray from the requisite script, interviewing prospective students who in turn provide answers generated by another AI. Welcome to the university of the future.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of nine books, including most recently, The National Interest: Politics after Globalization (2025).
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SubscribeGiven that nuclear power is dirty, expensive and far too dangerous and that Germany (as far as I know) does not have oil and gas, I’m not sure it has much of a choice. One of the many lessons of the Ukraine War for Germany is to make sure such a disaster never happens again.
To the extent that there was a “disaster”, it was Germany relying on Russia for gas.
German return to ostpolitik was inevitable. Poland and Ukraine apoplectic
If they rebuild Nordstream, my guess it will blow up like it did last time.
The Greens prevented the prisoner exchange with Navalny, insisted on destroying the nuclear power plants, not caring that the alternative was the fantastically polluting lignite mines, which were opened up again. How nice that they are hawkish.
Lignite is very useful stuff. It can be burned to produce electricity.
Sanctions haven’t worked, and have damaged the West more than Russia. This is quite common. The US’s sanctions against Japan provoked Pearl Harbour. Sanctions against Iraq did…nothing at all, except mean that Iran could rest easy . Future historians will marvel at the favouritism shown to undemocratic Arab monarchies, and the harshness to secular Arab states.
I’m sure the sanctions could be made a lot harsher if the West has the fortitude to do so.
Now I’m really confused. I have spent months reading Unherd columnists and a third of the commentors saying that Russia is a dangerous empire, slavering over war with more European countries.
But now I read that important German politicians are serious about re-doing business with the Russians. How can that be? Don’t they know that Putin is itching to conquer Germany? Can both be true?
The first paragraph is true. To the extent that the first sentence of the second paragraph is true, it is because those politicians are idiots.
Here is an absurdity of our times: Germany turned tricks with Russia for decades, empowering Putin’s ambitions and indifferent to his intentions on Ukraine. No European country did more to abet Putin’s imperial ambitions than Germany. And yet it has not been called to account and is likely to resume its prostitution post Ukraine. Trump comes along and merely utters a few indiscretions regarding Ukraine while working to end the war and is held up as a monster for so doing, despite his having been the US president who armed Ukraine pre-2022.
We know Moscow is a rancid government. But if these past three tragic years in Ukraine has shown us, it’s also not the existential threat to Europe that it was made out to be.
If indeed Europe is going to rearm and take on its own security, it’s going to need lots of energy, and that means for now, cheap Russian gas and oil.
“The West,” and certainly my own country, the United States, has done business with far worse characters. Why would we want to lock them out of any Western economic relationships and push them further into the embrace and control of China?
Maybe it’s a sell-out to a bad guy, or maybe it’s just a matter of being realistic in realizing that Germany needs energy, and to quote the Godfather, that it’s better to keep one’s enemies close.
“But if these past three tragic years in Ukraine has shown us, it’s also not the existential threat to Europe that it was made out to be“. That is true, but only because of the abject corruption that pervades every aspect of Russia, including its military. The Russians might not currently have the means to invade Western Europe, but they have the desire.
Germany needs cheap Russian Gas … don’t antagonise them and they won’t antagonise us … we really shouldn’t be fighting. Russia is not our enemy.
Ukraine would be intact and fully functioning today if we didn’t try to use it as a launchpad to destabilise and antagonise Russia.
A million plus dead. Millions of lives destroyed, hundreds of billions spent AND we lost. This should be the last western military adventure for a while. We need to have a little think about what we’re aiming at and why.
National sovereignty. Pretty straightforward.
Not a concept recognised by the West…Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria…
Russia has only been applying the “rules” created by Western precedent.
Well, the idea was to weaken Germany industrially.
Lets hope so. Peaceful trade would be great
Am worried the uk and france want to push the war onwards due to economic stresses at home.
Peace would be great, but unfortunately the Russians are complete barbarians who aren’t even remotely interested in it.
Oh look, the Germans are finally coming to the conclusion that cutting off your nose to spite your face isn’t a realistic economic strategy.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. “Which Germany stole from Russia” would be more honest and factual>
Putin, the ayatollahs, Xi and Trump are all very different in many ways, but with one common factor: each is a highly accomplished bully. Germany is at one with most of Europe and UK in thinking that bullies can be bought off. They can’t.
So, no different from the EU…
Angela Merkel is back in power.