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  "content": "---\ntitle: \"AI in higher education: dystopia, utopia or something in between?\"\ndescription: \"AI tools in higher education won't operate in isolation---they'll reshape information flows between students, instructors and institutions in ways we need to watch carefully.\"\ntags:\n  - ai\n  - teaching\n---\n\nimport Picture from \"@/components/Picture.astro\";\n\n<p class=\"post-subtitle\">\n  To understand how HE can incorporate AI successfully, we need to think about how humans will\n  interact with the technology and change their behaviour, says Ben Swift\n</p>\n\n:::info\n\nThis article originally\n[appeared in Times Higher Education](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/ai-higher-education-dystopia-utopia-or-something-between).\n\n:::\n\n<Picture file=\"posts/ai-eye.webp\" alt=\"a blue eye with weird techy-looking things in the iris\" />\n\nAI applications are already part of the higher education experience for\nstudents, instructors and administrators. Some of them are chatbots and\nintelligent tutoring systems, some are auto-grading and feedback apps, and some\nare used in academic integrity breach detection and exam proctoring.\n\nWe're also on the crest of a wave of new [AI](https://openai.com)\n[apps](https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement) for text/image\nsynthesis, where you give the AI a prompt such as \"What role did Sir John Kerr\nplay in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis?\" or \"Draw a picture of a red\nunicorn playing a Fender Stratocaster\" and\n[it will spit out a \"response\"](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/original-essays-written-seconds-how-transformers-will-change-assessment)\nwhich, while not always perfect, in most cases could pass for something hacked\ntogether by a harried student in the few hours before an assessment deadline.\n\nI'm writing as someone with 10 years' experience as a lecturer and course\nconvener in [computer science](https://comp.anu.edu.au/people/ben-swift/) and\n[cybernetics](https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/ben-swift/). I've taught\nboth large (400-student) compulsory courses and 10-student\n[special interest](https://comp.anu.edu.au/courses/laptop-ensemble/) courses.\nI've also built software tools for automating some aspects of these courses,\nalthough they more commonly use\n[normal \"if-then-else\" programmes rather than AI ones](https://grow.astrolabs.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-vs-traditional-programming/).\n\nHowever, as an AI researcher, I also build AI-powered tools---and I can\ncertainly see the convergence between the \"AI research and tool-building\" part\nof my job and the teaching part.\n\nTo understand the way in which AI will transform higher education, it's useful\nto consider the interactions between human and AI parts of the system, rather\nthan focusing on individual AI tools in isolation. For example, will the AI\nessay generators stay ahead of the AI plagiarism-detection bots? Will the AI\ntutoring apps lighten the workload of our teaching assistants, or will the\nworkload just shift to helping the students use the AI tutoring apps?\n\nTo understand what is happening with the introduction of AI into the higher\neducation experience, it's crucial to realise that so much of the student and\ninstructor experience in a course is about flows of information. For example, an\ninstructor creates an assignment spec, which is sent to the student. In\nresponse, the student (synthesising many sources of information, from both the\ncourse curriculum and elsewhere) produces and creates an assignment artefact\n(such as an essay). This artefact is graded by an instructor, and both a\nnumerical mark and qualitative feedback are sent back to the student---another\ninformation flow, which will inform the students' work in subsequent\nassignments.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is all there is to participating in\na university course---crucially, the human community aspect is missing in the\nabove description, for a start. However, thinking about the above information\nflow gives us a helpful perspective for considering where AI might amplify or\ndampen the different information flows within the system, or where it may give\nrise to new ones.\n\nThere are three potential \"system dynamics\" I'm on the lookout for as AI becomes\nmore deeply integrated into higher education.\n\nFirst, while it's less clear whether the aforementioned AI text and image\nsynthesis tools will make the best student work even better, it's pretty clear\nthat they will allow students who only care about passing without actually\nattaining the course learning outcomes to do so with much less effort. The\nimplication for instructors is that if you're grading a text/image artefact it's\nnow _much_ harder to tell whether the artefact is the work \"only\" of the student\nor whether they had the help of an AI tool to create it. In other words, if the\nquestion of whether AI was involved in the creation of an artefact really\nmatters, it will be increasingly hard to give a definitive answer, especially\nwithout specialised expertise and under the time pressures that instructors have\nto complete grading.\n\nSecond, there are going to be feedback loops involved. For example, a big\nselling point of AI chatbot products is that you can teach larger classes (or\ncreate new classes) than you would otherwise have the instructors to support. AI\ntext summarisation tools could also help with grading/triaging, especially given\nthe limits on budgets for teaching assistant hours. One potential endgame for\nthis dynamic is that instead of having to\n[cap places on high-demand degree programmes](https://www.dailycal.org/2022/08/24/campus-college-of-letters-and-science-plans-to-limit-high-demand-majors/),\nclass sizes could grow until student demand is satisfied.\n\nThe risk here is that such a class would become incredibly reliant on those AI\ntools to handle its teaching workload without burning out all the humans\ninvolved in the process. And humans will still be involved, since (almost)\nnobody is proposing that we have purely automated classes in higher education.\n\nThird, human-AI co-creation isn't going anywhere, so make it part of your\nassessments. Get students to design new front ends and workflows that other\nstudents can try out. How about an essay-writing assignment where the students\nare encouraged to write the topic sentences for each paragraph and use AI to\ncomplete the rest? The students could then critically reflect (and be assessed)\non their process of iteratively poking the AI (via the topic sentence prompts)\nto ensure a coherent overall argument for the essay. Alternatively, using the\n\"reverse assignment\" approach, the instructor could enlist the help of AI to\nwrite an assignment spec and have the students come up with a rubric and\nsuggested improvements to their assignment spec as _their_ deliverable.\n\nFinally, I do wonder whether (and hope that) some of these AI tools might make\ncontract cheating less profitable as a business, because the humans that provide\nthose services will be automated away as well---although, admittedly, the\ncheating-industrial complex is well positioned to take advantage of the\nAI-enabled future of higher education, as those involved have probably got the\nbest databases of instructor- and student-created content on the planet.\n\nThe main takeaway here is that AI tools in higher education won't operate in\nisolation; they'll become part of the system, where students can churn out\npassable essays faster, but instructors can also grade them faster. It's unclear\nwhich \"side\" of this transaction will win out, or which balancing mechanisms\n(natural or regulatory) will be required in response, so it's important to\ndesign your class so that such \"AI content arms races\" aren't so likely.\n\nThere's a dystopian \"future of AI in education\" scenario in which AI-generated\nassignments are graded by AI grading and feedback bots, with dull-eyed human\nteachers and students who are largely disconnected and disenfranchised. But I'm\nnot in this dystopian camp. I am, however, keeping an eye out for how _human_\nstudents and instructors change their behaviour in response to the changes in\nthe information ecosystem in which we exist.\n\n:::info\n\n[Ben Swift](https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/ben-swift/) is educational\nexperiences lead and associate director (education) at the ANU School of\nCybernetics. The ANU School of Cybernetics is activating cybernetics as an\nimportant tool for navigating major societal transformations through capability\nbuilding, policy development and safe, sustainable and responsible approaches to\nnew systems.\n\n:::\n",
  "createdAt": "2026-05-13T23:14:47.987Z",
  "description": "AI tools in higher education won't operate in isolation---they'll reshape information flows between students, instructors and institutions in ways we need to watch carefully.",
  "path": "/blog/2022/10/13/ai-in-higher-education-dystopia-utopia-or-somewhere-in-between",
  "publishedAt": "2022-10-13T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "teaching"
  ],
  "textContent": "AI tools in higher education won't operate in isolation---they'll reshape information flows between students, instructors and institutions in ways we need to watch carefully.",
  "title": "AI in higher education: dystopia, utopia or something in between?"
}