Transcription
Artificial intelligence seems like it's everywhere, but it's not always welcome. Graduates have booed commencement speakers who celebrate AI amid worries AI is going to take their jobs and lead to a bleak future. In fact, a recent opinion piece in The New York Times spotlighted AI's impact on the current graduating class as one of the most at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. And it was written by Stanford student and investigative journalist Theo Baker. Theo is also the author of a new book, How to Rule the World and Education and Power at Stanford University. Theo, great to be with you.
You write about being in the first class really to be impacted by AI. Was there ever a conversation about its fair use, plagiarism in any of these classes? And I'm curious, this is a two-part question, do the lines blur when so much of the focus on these classes, especially at Stanford, is on AI, how to build it, how to run it?
Yeah. Well, we were the first college class to arrive effectively with ChatGPT. It came on campus about two months after we did. And what it did was really heighten every trend that was already brimming beneath the surface. It's the sort of massive accelerator. One of the main effects has been to increase the stratification. Some people are getting very, very wealthy based off of AI. You know, the guy who taught me how to shotgun a beer freshman year dropped out of Stanford six months after he started his company with AI in the name. It was valued at over a billion dollars. But for many people, the the ladder is being drawn up. Last year was the first time in over two decades that Stanford's computer science enrollment went down, as I understand it. So, this is really the thing about AI is that it takes everything and it makes it more pronounced.
Have you spoken to anyone, either a teacher or fellow students, that are worried about AI's use in the classroom? I mean, recently we've seen commencement speakers booed when they talk about the future of AI. Is anyone at Stanford completely rebelling against it?
Absolutely. I think everyone recognizes the the danger that AI poses to certain facets of education, particularly when, you know, doing your own thinking is a big part of the intellectual labor that goes into to your formative college years. Um, the thing is though, people also realize it's something they can get rich off of. Stanford is one of these places that has become increasingly commercialized. No longer is education the primary goal, it's whether or not you're going to get a job or whether or not you're going to get rich. And that means it's sort of the vanguard of a trend that we've seen across higher education.
Yeah, you talk about how Stanford already has kind of a shaky representation for integrity. You mentioned well-known graduates currently serving prison time. Now you say that using AI to cheat is everywhere at Stanford. Everyone is doing it. In fact, you cite a stat that in your junior year, 49% of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail. Is this a problem with AI or is this a problem with Stanford?
Well, again, this is AI as an accelerant. That makes it so much easier to to to cheat and to deceive and to be rewarded for it. You know, I chronicle this very much in depth in the book that there has taken hold a culture in which cut corners are the thing that will get you ahead. But they are taught implicitly, these insider groups who are are going to rule the world as the next tech masters of the universe, they're taught that getting ahead means winning at any cost. That it means just a little bit of fraud in the immortal words of one of my classmates. And that, I think, is is where we see AI as a sort of tool that that allows for this trend, again, that was already there before, to become so much bigger of a problem.
Again, your book is called How to Rule the World, an education in power at Stanford University, and it was really about your reporting for the school paper about the then president of Stanford's research misconduct, which eventually led to his resignation. And to your point, you say Stanford's run more like a big business. You're about to graduate from Stanford in about a month. Does your extensive reporting on this prestigious university in any way tarnish that diploma that you're going to get?
Look, Stanford is a complicated thing. It's not a single institution at this point. It's a place with a budget higher than 116 countries. So, there are great professors, there are great students, there are great innovations happening every single day on campus. And yet, there is also this downside, this this culture of fraud enabled by the Faustian bargain that Stanford has made with Silicon Valley that has allowed it to reap its billions of dollars in rewards, and also allowed for this move fast and break things culture to take hold in absurd and and remarkable fashion on campus. So, if you talk to, you know, a 17-year-old Theo Baker, would you still go to Stanford if you had the opportunity again? I think I made the right choice given the information I had. Theo Baker, thanks so much. Good luck on those finals. >> [laughter]