Con: Should Professors Use AI?
I will admit it. When a tedious assignment stands between me and bedtime, I feel the temptation to open up ClaudeAI. It is so easy to let AI summarize everything I need to know in a few succinct bullet points filled with words like “delve” and “streamline.” Hours of work could be condensed into minutes. […]
Pro: Should Professors Use AI?
Whether it’s to summarize a jargon-heavy excerpt for class or to outline reasoning in an argumentative essay, there exists an unspoken shame in using AI among those who consider themselves academics. This is understandable. The fundamental pursuits of academic life, such as intellectual freedom and truth, seem diametrically opposed to the ends of the tech […]
Con: Is the Meme-ification of Politics Positive?
Allegations of pedophilia and sexual abuse, discussions of presidential fitness, even political assassinations–issues that warrant sober debate–now circulate the internet primarily as memes. Somewhere beneath the edits, deepfakes, and reaction GIFs lies an actual, nuanced political story, but it’s almost impossible to find. Career-ending scandals are reduced to viral punchlines and, more than anything, politics […]
Faculty Forum: Con: Should Tufts Ban Technology in the Classroom?
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shocked academia in general and the humanities in particular. If we rely too much upon machines to perform demanding tasks, such as generating essays, summarizing complex documents, and translating sources in unfamiliar languages, we can produce quite a bit but learn little or nothing. I do not see any simple […]
Doomscrolling Isn’t Inherently Bad
I can pin the very moment I first realized I was “doomscrolling.” It was March 2020, a turning point in many of our young lives, and one where the only path forward I saw was ignoring the state of the world outside my room. The doom lay in the fact that I did not think […]
Doomscrolling Is Inherently Bad
Throughout the overwhelming majority of human history, our knowledge acquisition faced meaningful spatial and temporal constraints. In prehistory, human knowledge was limited to communal memory and oral traditions. In early civilization, the accumulation of information expanded with the innovation of the written word stored on clay tablets. Accessing their extant knowledge, however, remained an arduous […]