Dean of top liberal arts university says AI could make Gen Z less skilled, not more

But a dean at Ireland’s top university, and one of the world’s best liberal arts schools, isn’t convinced his students are getting much out of the technology and worries it could cripple their ability to land a job when they graduate.

Speaking to the Irish Times, professor Laurent Muzellec said AI is just the latest advancement since the times of Socrates that has involved “letting go some skills.” That has big implications for Gen Z students at Trinity and elsewhere.

‘They literally don’t learn anything’

“What’s happening with AI, especially with generative AI, is that you literally don’t need to know anything to use the technology, at least to use it badly,” Muzellec told the Times.

“You just need to ask it the question, and it will spew out some kind of algorithmic answer, and that brings a huge threat to our ability to learn and our ability to upskill.

“The threat is that we will de-skill.”

Trinity College is famous for excelling globally in liberal arts subjects. The college is ranked 21st in the world for its English literature program, and 40th globally for the performing arts.

Indeed, the university set the scene for the millennial love story Normal People, where Connell and Marianne’s fraught romance was set against the backdrop of their time studying English literature and history and politics, respectively.

But Muzellec is concerned his students might start to get sloppy as they integrate large language models like ChatGPT into their essay writing. He said he had to assume 99.9% of his pupils were using the technology, often to their detriment.

“What the preliminary studies on AI show is that if students just use it to take the question their lecturer has asked, put it into the AI software, and then give back the answer, they are less motivated to learn. They literally don’t learn anything,” he said.

Will AI make us better or worse?

Professor Muzellec’s intervention pours cold water on widespread ambitions about a revolution among workers to leverage AI to become better at their jobs. It also raises questions about how shortcuts like ChatGPT could be affecting the long-term learning of Gen Z. 

The narrative on how employers will introduce AI to their workforce has often been murky. Indeed, employees have often been left in the dark about how they are meant to upskill. 

But optimists think workers will be able to leverage AI to improve their productivity, and a big share of those workers could come from a surprising source.

Speaking to Fortune in December, IBM Consulting’s partner in generative AI, Matt Candy, said graduates with a background in the liberal arts could be a hot commodity in the tech labor market.

“Questioning, creativity skills, and innovation are going to be hugely important, because I think AI’s going to free up more capacity for creative thought processes,” he noted.

“The speed at which people will be able to come up with an idea, to test the idea, to make something, it’s going to be so accelerated. You don’t need to have a degree in computer science to do that.”

Candy said jobs like prompt engineers, effectively teaching AI to think and speak like a human, will be incredibly valuable as incidents of “hallucinations” from the technology increase. 

Whether those students can keep their wits about them during university to land those jobs, though, is up in the air.