As a lecturer in music at a major UK university, Ben Jennings’ cartoon on the threat posed by AI to the creative industries (5 June) is painfully apt, not only for the creative industries but the institutions that teach them. Universities are already in crisis due to a complex web of problems including the commodification of education. Now, I spend much of my time suspecting students of using AI to write essays and even – we increasingly think – to write music. Not being able to definitively prove it renders us powerless.
I would estimate that a good half of the written work I see has had some AI input. I genuinely think some of these students don’t realise that it’s cheating. And it’s happened so fast that we don’t even know what to tell our students about these tools. Used properly they are useful, but academics have no idea how to do this.
There is now the bizarre reality that work can be written by AI and marked by AI – a truly hellish scenario for the human intellect. Increasingly, academics are realising that in-person exams are going to have to be reintroduced. I would support this, and many others would too.
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