Episode 139: Professor Garret Merriam on Ethics and AI in Higher Education

In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be incorrect. The process of analysing the results was “exceptionally stressful”, taking up time that he “would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.”Since then, Garret has been sounding the alarm about the prevalence of AI use and cheating at American universities, alongside writers and teachers like Ted Gioia and Troy Jollimore.Tales of woe continue to emerge from academia. Teachers are fed up of running faster and faster to stay still, spending increasing time and energy fighting the intrusion of AI-enabled cheating, playing the role of an enforcer to the detriment of delivering an education to their students.New York Magazine recently published a piece by James Walsh called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College which, despite the clickbait title doing a disservice to the many students who are trying to learn, gives a thorough picture of the parlous state of pedagogy in the age of AI. As one source tells Walsh in the article: “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”Is this the typical bellyaching of an older generation as youth discover new technologies and ways of behaving? Or is there a real problem in higher education?Garret joins me in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion on the impact that AI has had on his experience as a teacher, how he tries to balance enforcement and prevention with his responsibilities as an educator, as well as the practical and philosophical implications for society if machine learning supplants human learning.In the humanities especially, we face a pressing and vital question: Who do we become as a culture when our understanding of ourselves is shaped not by individual study and reflection but the acceptance and use of what machines say we are?You can follow Garret on X or explore his YouTube channel, Sisyphus Redeemed.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com