From “Public Good” to “Prompt Engineering”: The High Cost of Automated Learning
- Institutional Hypocrisy:Â Universities like the California State University (CSU) system are slashing budgets, cutting faculty, and eliminating humanities programs while simultaneously spending millions on partnerships with OpenAI, effectively prioritizing corporate chatbots over human educators.
- The “Cheating-Industrial” Complex: A perverse feedback loop has emerged where universities buy AI tools, students use AI to cheat, and universities buy more AI to detect cheating, while startups openly monetize academic dishonesty as “efficiency.”
- Cognitive Atrophy:Â Emerging research suggests that reliance on AI for writing results in significant “cognitive debt,” reducing neural connectivity and effectively training students to stop thinking, transforming education into a transaction of empty credentials.
I used to think the hype surrounding artificial intelligence was just that—hype. I was wrong. The initial panic among faculty about plagiarism didn’t fade; it mutated into a frantic, corporate embrace. Almost overnight, the hand-wringing turned into hand-rubbing. Professors who once feared the death of the essay rebranded themselves as “AI-ready,” and universities rushed to sign contracts with the very companies threatening to dismantle their foundations.
The Math of Auto-Cannibalism
The contradiction is starkest in the California State University (CSU) system. America’s largest public university system recently announced a $17-million partnership with OpenAI to become the nation’s first “AI-Empowered” university.  Â
The timing was surreal. This “grand technological gesture” arrived exactly as the system proposed slashing $375 million from its budget. While administrators cut ribbons on ChatGPT Edu, they were handing pink slips to lecturers. Sonoma State announced plans to cut 23 academic programs and over 130 faculty positions. The message is brutal but clear: the university is outsourcing education, paying premium prices for a chatbot while firing the humans who actually teach.  Â
The Cheating-Industrial Complex
Before AI, plagiarism was a violation. Now, it is a venture-capital-backed business model. A dark “ouroboros” has formed: universities partner with AI companies; students use AI to cheat; universities panic and partner with more AI companies to detect the cheating.
The market for fraud is brazen. A Columbia University dropout, Chungin “Roy” Lee, admitted AI wrote 80% of his essays. After being suspended, he raised $5.3 million for a startup called Cluely, explicitly marketed to help students cheat. His tagline? “We want to cheat on everything… so you never have to think alone again.” In the “Chatversity,” cheating is no longer deviant behavior—it’s a brand identity.  Â
Bullshit Degrees and Cognitive Debt
If ChatGPT writes the paper, the professor uses AI to grade it, and the administration uses AI to write the press release celebrating “efficiency,” what remains? We are creating “bullshit degrees”—credentials that signify nothing about actual competence.
The cost is not just financial; it is biological. A recent MIT study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that when students used AI to write essays, their brain scans showed a 47% drop in neural connectivity. Even worse, 83% of heavy AI users couldn’t recall key points of their own work. We are not just allowing students to take shortcuts; we are training them to atrophy their own minds.
The Resistance
Ironically, the strongest resistance comes from the students themselves. At San Francisco State, professors note that many working-class and first-generation students are refusing to use these tools. They understand a transaction that administrators miss: they are paying tuition for mentorship and intellectual struggle, not to be beta testers for an automation product.
They see the “Chatversity” for what it is: a liquidation sale of higher education. The university isn’t innovating; it’s capitulating. And as long as we prioritize “prompt engineering” over critical thinking, we aren’t preparing students for the future—we’re rendering them obsolete.