If you listen to the prophets of artificial intelligence, a wonderful future begins to take shape: a post-scarcity society where nobody needs to work, all diseases are cured, and human life is changed beyond recognition. Well, unless the machines are “misaligned”, and just wipe us out. At the other extreme, skeptics tell us that AI is just another normal technology: one that will have various important effects, for sure, but that in the grand scheme of things is going to matter less than indoor plumbing or antibiotics. Oh, and that it’s also a giant financial bubble.
I’m neither an economist nor a computer scientist, and I don’t possess a crystal ball — so like most people, I struggle to know what to make of it all (even if my suspicions tend toward the latter). But I do teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential.
However, the reasons for this are not straightforward. As often, reality is complicated. Still, we can make headway by bracketing out the question of what AI means for university research — which will differ dramatically across fields — and instead focus on teaching. Specifically, students who use LLMs to complete their coursework assignments. Ask anybody lecturing in a university today and they will tell you the same: the impact has been dramatic.
The most obvious change is that whereas plagiarism software was previously very good at catching students passing off copied work as their own, LLMs evade this entirely. Programs like ChatGPT generate wholly original text based on the prompts you feed them, making plagiarism software useless. (It’s cheating, Jim, but not as we knew it.)
Likewise, software which claims to be able to detect AI-generated text is of no help, yielding false results in both directions. Students know this. I can only speak directly to the effect on essay-based subjects, but I can’t imagine the situation is any better in the sciences. In turn, we academics are painfully aware that at least some students are using the technology, and hence we are sometimes giving out grades for work spat out by machines, but fraudulently presented as human.
Shouldn’t we, the certified experts, be able to tell the difference between undergraduate work and LLM slop? Well kind of — but it’s tricky. A little while ago I was confidently pronouncing on my ability to spot AI-generated work in my field. When it comes to political philosophy, there is a certain tone of arch confidence — a panoramic control of the wider discipline — that it takes years of reading, writing, and thinking to pull off. No undergraduate has been studying the subject anywhere near long enough to be able to write with that level of control and authority. Hence when I find this tone in student work, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got an LLM-cheat.
As a colleague pointed out to me, however, this runs straight into the “toupée fallacy”. Imagine I confidently proclaim that men who wear toupées always look bad, and would be better off just going bald. After all, we can all tell they are wearing wigs! The problem here is that I’m assuming I can always spot a toupée. The good toupées are precisely the ones I don’t spot. Just because I can spot some toupées (the bad ones) doesn’t mean I can spot all toupées — indeed, the good ones are precisely the ones I miss, in turn feeding my mistaken confidence that I can spot them all. The same goes for student use of LLMs. Those who are effective at using the technology to cheat are precisely the ones getting away with it.
And even when I spot the coursework equivalent of a toupée, there’s usually nothing I can do about it anyway. My gut instinct that coursework feels like AI is, reasonably enough, insufficient proof to fail a submission. Unless the student is daft enough to have included a hallucinated bibliography of made-up AI references (and yes, this does happen), they always have plausible deniability. Their word, against my gut instinct. Unprincipled offenders win every time. After all, for a student willing to cheat on submitted assignments, a bit of extra lying isn’t much of a leap.
Yet it’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts. Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you?
“The more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts.”
The answer to which is: because it is only through the struggle, the forcing, the wrestling with ideas for yourself, over the course of years, that you can truly train and develop your mind. Indeed, this is the reason university humanities degrees put such a high premium on writing. Writing is thinking. Until you have tried to put your ideas on the page, you never really know if you understand them and have them under control.
Unfortunately, the truth of these facts only becomes apparent with experience — which is exactly what undergraduates lack. You may also be surprised to hear that people in their late teens and early twenties tend not to be good at putting off immediate pleasure in exchange for distant reward. Traditionally, one thing that universities were good at was teaching young people this skill by forcing them to acquire it. (One learns by doing.) LLMs, however, pose a direct threat to this entire process. They are a quick-fix drug dangled before students’ noses whose true effects appear to be the stunting of intellectual development.
What I would give to demolish the Silicon Valley cartels foisting this corrosive digital narcotic upon my students! Move fast and break things? How I wish I could return the favor.
By this point, it is abundantly clear that the only pedagogically robust response to LLMs in universities is at least a partial return to traditional methods. Reliance on online coursework has to be reduced; a significant return to paper and pen is required. This is the only way we can guarantee that students are not cheating in (all) their submissions. It is only by demanding that they prove their knowledge directly, in person, that we can incentivize them to go away and learn properly in their own time. Everybody in higher education knows this already.
But not everybody will admit it. University administrators in particular don’t want to admit it. This is not just because they’ve already invested huge amounts of money in online systems amid the headlong race to “embrace” AI and enter into hefty contracts with companies like Microsoft Copilot to teach students how to use AI tools. (As if middle-aged people like me are the ones who need to teach the kids how to use technology.) More than this, it is also the result of the sheer scale of modern university operations.
Although some institutions have already moved to integrate pen and paper exams, places like King’s College London, where I work, are trying to run away from the reality. This is in part because we have more students enrolled than we could possibly fit into exam rooms during a finite exam period. This is presumably why, at a meeting with our university “AI Lead” last year, my department was told that a return to having majority exam-based assessments was straightforwardly not an option.
Instead, my colleagues and I were told that the university AI policy is that we as teachers must strive to become so inspirational that our students will not want to use LLMs in any nefarious capacity. In this scenario, they will only use it to “enhance their learning” (whatever that means).
Now listen, I’m not completely against this line of thought. In fact, I try to do this anyway. But can we please stop with the willful naivety? Students today arrive at university having been raised in a culture, and an education system, that hammers into them the mantra that the main reason you go to university is to get a classification on a piece of paper (preferably 2:1 or above), the major function of which is to be a ticket on the job market.
Some of my students see their degree as more than that: an opportunity to learn, explore ideas, expand their mental horizons through structured education where the only path to genuine reward is hard work. But let’s get real — they are the exception, the minority. Most are not like that. And who can really blame them? They are taking on tens of thousands in debt on the assurance that this is a necessary financial transaction undertaken to secure future earning potential. They are the customers, we are the retailers. UK universities have been fundamentally rigged this way for the last 20 years. And now you say that it’s my job to inspire a love of learning so deep that all of those factors can be overcome? That somehow my charisma in the lecture hall can compete with the narcotics of Silicon Valley? Please.
Yet this is precisely where the wider pieces start coming together and the threat becomes existential.
UK universities today are expected to operate like businesses. If we cannot attract sufficient numbers of students, and bring in the fees that they pay, then we cannot expect to stay open. Student fees effectively haven’t increased since they were hiked by the coalition government, meaning their value has fallen in real terms by about 30%. Until recently, the main strategy for dealing with this was massive increases in Master’s degrees, with a very deliberate focus on attracting international students, who pay much higher fees. Which in practice largely meant: the Chinese.
Who cares that rampant fraud has been committed as a result? UK degrees are now routinely awarded to students unable to send three sentences of coherent English in an email, who never say a word in class, and are manifestly cheating on coursework (many were relying on commercial online essay farms even before the arrival of LLMs). University teachers like me have tried to kick up a fuss — and are promptly told by administrators to pipe down and get on with despoiling our vocation. After all, who did we think was paying our salaries?
“UK degrees are now routinely awarded to students unable to send three sentences of coherent English in an email, who never say a word in class, and are manifestly cheating on coursework.”
But about two years ago, the magic money tree started to shrivel. The story is complicated, but, in effect, Beijing started to tighten the taps, while the racist riots of summer 2024 rather put off international students from coming to our delightful shores. Universities panicked and are now pivoting away from an emphasis on Master’s degrees towards massively increasing undergraduate numbers.
The problem is that there are only a limited number of undergraduates across the sector. So now we have competitive cannibalization. The Russell Group, for example, is in a dog-eat-dog contest where some universities (like mine) massively increase undergraduate cohorts — at the direct expense of smaller, more provincial institutions. For now my job is safe – less so colleagues at the University of York, an equally venerable institution, but which last year was trying to shed 20% of its staff. And of course, this contest is simply being passed along, jeopardizing less prestigious institutions in turn. Many British universities are now facing financial collapse as a result.
These dogs, however, may also be in a race to the bottom. The entire contest is predicated on the assumption that undergraduates will still want to bother to come to university at all. Yet graduate recruiting is down, and there are emerging signs that this is a direct response to the rise of LLMs. Why hire 100 graduate trainees when you can just get one and ask Claude to do the rest of the work at a fraction of the cost and 1,000 times as fast? And equally, why take on £50k of debt to get a degree, if a degree no longer gets you a job anyway? As tech chiefs publicly predict the end of white collar work within the next two years, you can forgive the next generation for choosing to sit things out.
If LLMs gut the graduate workforce, it won’t just be the undergraduate essay that they put out of business. It will be the British university sector as a whole – which is easily big enough to take the rest of the economy with it. The chickens are coming home to roost. And when they land not just the shed, but the entire farm, may yet crumble under their weight.
