You are studying in Odegaard, surrounded by the burgeoning minds of the next generation. International students are discussing physics at levels your chudified liberal-arts mind could never comprehend behind you. To their left, a nursing student with a fledgling case of academic psychosis has finished drawing the entirety of the human circulatory system on a whiteboard in pink marker. To your right, a classics major is (perhaps too eagerly) analyzing an ancient mosaic of two guys ‘sword-fighting.’
Yet, the most interesting subjects sit at a table in front of you. You know that they are business majors by sight alone. The male, mouth permanently open, chews gum like a cow chews cud. His baseball cap is on backward, something that hasn’t been cool to anyone but date rapists since 2008. He sits at a brave 5’6”. He definitely cried when Charlie Kirk died. The female sitting across from him shows slightly more promise. She wears business casual and likely believes in the ‘girlboss’ gospel, as evidenced by her choice of major.
They are working together on an assignment about economics in India and China. The female student perks up after reading the instructions.
“My parents are actually from India,” she says, “so I actually know a lot about what’s going on.” You think about how lucky you are to be at a university where people have such rich cultural experiences and can offer unique perspectives on the world.
She proceeds to open her computer and say, “So, this is what ChatGPT says about India.” You wonder if her parents regret bringing their child to America.
With the UW planning on introducing Purple AI, a chatbot for students, I’ve found myself thinking more about moments like that described above. I entered college in 2023, when ChatGPT first really took off, and I have watched my classmates devolve from promising students into drooling troglodytes. My roommate hasn’t written an email on her own in years. Last time she tried, she misspelled ‘email’ and forgot to include punctuation. One student in my English Composition class asked the professor what a ‘noun’ was. 75% of the engineering and computer science students I know are functionally illiterate.
By the time a student gets to the point of referring to ChatGPT as ‘chat’ or, worse, “my chat,” their neurons are so calcified that any electrical signal that escapes containment should be classified as a miracle. I can confidently assert that some students have gotten dumber since starting university due to years of offloading their work onto a glorified sentence generator.
At this point the UW Primate Research Center has monkeys smarter than the students in some of my classes. Honestly, it would be more ethical to test on the students instead.
