AI can do students' writing for them. Universities should embrace it anyway

As a university professor, the spectre of artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere these days — so much so that I taught a class on the subject. When I asked my students why they signed up, their answers varied, from wanting to know what the technology can do, to those who were tired of professors telling them not to use AI.
That latter point is understandable. As entrepreneurs, lawyers, engineers and designers jump into AI feet first, schools and universities slam on the brakes, nervous about the implications of the new technology.

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Time of India

23 minutes ago

• Time of India

New club at Anna library to foster engagement with AI

Chennai: In a bid to foster literacy in artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, the Anna AI Club was inaugurated at Anna Centenary Library on Sunday. The club, which will meet every first and third Sunday of the month, aims to provide a platform for experts and anyone interested in AI to share and discuss ideas, and disseminate information, paving the way for deeper engagement on the subject, chief librarian S Kamatchi told TOI. "Outcomes of the meeting will be recorded and can be used to recommend policies to the govt as well. As of now, we have collaborated with Tamil Nadu Centre for Advanced Manufacturing (TANCAM) and a private readers' circle, Varungal Padipom, to set up the club. In the future, we will collaborate with several industry experts and organisations working in the space as well," Kamatchi added. P Shankar, director of Public Libraries, delivered the inaugural address and spoke about the role of AI in reshaping education and making knowledge more accessible to all. M Shanmugam, secretary to the chief minister, unveiled the official Anna AI Club logo, which was designed by artist Trotsky Marudhu, and expressed hope that the club would develop into a robust initiative in the future. Civil servant R Balakrishnan spoke about how AI played a crucial role in public speaking, providing instantaneous suggestions and making connections with ancient texts, including Sangam Literature. T Sankara Saravanan, principal of the All India Civil Services Coaching Centre, explained distinct uses of AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok-3, and said that they benefited a range of stakeholders from translators to competitive exam aspirants. Sauri Rajan, representing TANCAM, spoke about AI's role in bridging language, heritage, and manufacturing, and its potential to unite traditional knowledge with advanced manufacturing technologies.

Forbes

31 minutes ago

• Forbes

From Cognitive Debt To Cognitive Dividend: 4 Factors

Benjamin Franklin portrait and light bulbs idea concept on white background When an eye-catching (not yet peer reviewed) MIT Media Lab paper — Your Brain on ChatGPT — landed this month, the headline sounded almost playful. The data are anything but. Over four months, students who leaned on a large-language model to draft SAT-style essays showed the weakest neural connectivity, lowest memory recall, and flattest writing style of three comparison groups. The authors dub this hidden cost cognitive debt: each time we let a machine think for us, natural intelligence quietly pays interest. Is it time to quit the AI train while we still can, or this the moment to adopt a more thoughtful yet pragmatic alternative to blind offloading? We can deliberately offset cognitive debt with intentional mental effort, switching between solo thinking and AI-assisted modes to stretch neural networks rather than letting them atrophy. Drawing from insights into physiology, this might be the moment to adopt a cognitive high-intensity interval training. To get started think in terms of four sequential guardrails, the 4 A-Factors — that convert short-term convenience into the long-term dividend of hybrid Intelligence:. Attitude: Set The Motive Before You Type (Or Vibe Code) Mindset shapes outcome. In a company memo published on 17 June 2025, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy urged employees to 'be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops, and experiment whenever you can'. Curiosity can frame the system as a colleague rather than a cognitive crutch. Before opening a prompt window, write one sentence that explains why you are calling on the model, for example, 'I am using the chatbot to prototype ideas that I will refine myself.' The pause anchors ownership. Managers can reinforce that habit by rewriting briefs: swap verbs such as generate or replace for verbs that imply collaboration like co-design or stress-test. Meetings that begin with a shared intention end with fewer rewrites and stronger ideas. Approach: Align Aspirations, Actions And Algorithms Technology always follows incentives. If we measure only speed or click-through, that is what machines will maximize, often at the expense of originality or empathy. It does not have to be an either-or equation. MIT Sloan research on complementary capabilities highlights that pattern recognition is silicon's strength while judgment and ethics remain ours. Teams therefore need a habit of alignment. First, trace how a desired human outcome, i.e. say, customer trust, translates into day-to-day actions such as transparent messaging. Then confirm that the optimization targets inside the model rewards those very actions, not merely throughput. When aspirations, actions, and algorithms pull in one direction, humans stay in the loop where values matter and machines are tailored with a prosocial intention to accelerate what we value. Ability: Build Double Literacy Tools do not level the playing field; they raise the ceiling for those who can question them. An EY Responsible AI Pulse survey released in June 2025 reported that fewer than one-third of C-suite leaders feel highly confident that their governance frameworks can spot hidden model errors. Meanwhile an Accenture study shows that ninety-two per cent of leaders consider generative AI essential to business reinvention. The gap is interesting. Closing it requires double literacy: fluency in interpersonal, human interplays and machine logic. On the technical side, managers should know how to read a model card, notice spurious correlations, and ask for confidence intervals. On the human side, they must predict how a redesigned workflow changes trust, autonomy, or diversity of thought. Promotions and pay should reward people who speak both languages, because the future belongs to translators, not spectators. Ambition: Scale Humans Up, Not Out The goal is not to squeeze people out but to stretch what people can do. MIT Sloan's Ideas Made to Matter recently profiled emerging 'hybrid intelligence' systems that amplify and augment human capability rather than replace it.. Ambition reframes metrics. Instead of chasing ten-per-cent efficiencies, design for ten-fold creativity. Include indicators such as learning velocity, cross-domain experimentation, and employee agency alongside traditional return on investment. When a firm treats AI as a catalyst for human ingenuity, the dividend compounds: faster product cycles, richer talent pipelines, and reputational lift. 4 Quick Takeaways Attitude → Write the 'why' before the prompt; the pause keeps you in charge. Approach → Harmonize values and tools; adjust the tool when it drifts away from the values you believe in, as a human, offline. Not the other way → Learn to challenge numbers and narratives; double literacy begins with you. Ambition → Audit metrics quarterly to be sure they elevate human potential. Cognitive Debt Is Not Destiny Attitude steers intention, approach ties goals to code, ability equips people to question what the code does, and ambition keeps the whole endeavor pointed at humane progress. Run every digital engagement through the 4 A factor grid and yesterday's mental mortgage turns into tomorrow's dividend in creativity, compassion and shared humanistic value for all stakeholders.

Daily Maverick

an hour ago

• Daily Maverick

Crossed Wires: Artificial intelligence slouches towards the advertising industry

Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — WB Yeats, The Second Coming Perhaps it's a bit of an overkill to link AI's looming encroachment on the advertising industry to Yeats' darkly foreboding poem. Yet, having just returned from Cannes, where the global ad industry's biggest event, the Golden Lions, is held, it was clear that AI was hanging like a shadow — not visible to everyone perhaps, but obvious at least to those who are certain of the disruption to come. They were the ones who looked like deer caught in the headlights, standing startled and paralysed amid the glitz and glamour of the event. I was there to present a paper titled 'AI in Advertising: Governance, Regulation and Other Troubles' on behalf of the Icas (International Council for Advertising Self-Regulation) Global Think Tank. I was not the only one talking about AI in Cannes; the conversations and presentations were everywhere. One disquieting question didn't have to be articulated: has the advertising industry arrived at its Fleet Street moment? The question refers to the collapse of the printed newspaper business in the mid-'90s, catalysed by digitisation and the internet, which brutally upended an industry that had remained largely unchanged for more than a century. There were many casualties and only a few survivors in its wake — which is what is likely to happen in advertising. Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed (just go to YouTube and search for Veo 3; here is but one example). The quality of the video and the AI 'actors' and locations is indistinguishable from those shot with cameras and populated by human actors and extras. With Veo 3, the user describes the scene they want to see, gives the actors a 'script' and 'directions', and Veo 3 does the rest. (Veo 3 is not the only text-to-video app, just the latest.) Professional-level text-to-video is a brand-new strand of Generative AI. There are, of course, grumbles. It has limitations. Currently, Veo 3 can only render eight seconds of video. Some visual elements are difficult to control or 'not quite right'. It is expensive. Expensive? Consider this: A marketing director will brief an agency to deliver a 30-second video commercial. The agency then refines the brief, perhaps with a rough storyboard and brand/campaign context, and passes it on to a few video production companies. One of those companies comes up with a creative approach and pitches a treatment: three days of shooting, four locations, three actors, 10 extras, two weeks of post-production. Budget? $1.5-million. Or the agency can use Veo 3 in the hands of a single tech-savvy director and perhaps a good human Veo 3 expert. Cost? $150,000, with 10 differently flavoured commercials rendered for presentation to the client within two weeks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going. It signals the end of video production companies, except for live events or productions with celebrity actors. One estimate I heard at the conference predicted 3,000 production company bankruptcies globally within two years. And it may mean the end of some ad agencies if some corporations decide to plough the money they're saving in production costs into forming new in-house agencies. Dystopian scenario This scenario isn't even the worst of it. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently spelt out the following audacious and dystopian scenario: 'We're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.' Here is his vision: A business comes to Meta with a product and a few ideas, and then Meta takes over; it does everything: creative concept, production, media strategy, analytics. Then AI constantly refines the ad in near-real time, on an ongoing basis, until it performs at maximum efficiency. Zuckerberg, somewhat brutally, implied that, in the future, advertising agencies will not be required. There are those who will strenuously object, who will talk about brand strategy and management, understanding client product roadmaps, and other assumed sacred cows — the 'deep' cores of the agency proposition. These too, I submit, will fall to AI as soon as it learns from hundreds of thousands of successful brand case studies and is able to generate a plethora of its own novel approaches. Audience targeting Finally, there is the matter of audience targeting. The holy grail of the advertising industry has long been the idea of the perfectly relevant ad — one that is pitched directly and only to individual consumers who are looking to buy that very product or service. Consumers have also sought the same thing: ads that matter to them and do not waste their attention. It has been assumed to be a perfect match of incentives. But AI is now able to understand much more about individuals than we are comfortable with. By analysing our internet behaviour, our social media behaviour, our friends, our devices, our buying patterns, even the tenor of our emotional states when we post, AI can paint a near-perfect picture of who we are at any moment. This intrusion is a privacy nightmare, one demanding regulation, which may not be properly enforceable in a fast-fracturing and chaotic landscape. There will, of course, be some advertising agencies which grab the nettle and shed their old skins to quickly embrace and exploit AI, perhaps pivoting quickly enough to other business models to avoid obsolescence. Others will end up like the celluloid film editors I used to know, obstinately and proudly refusing to submit to the newfangled video editing systems that started arriving in the late 1990s. They were brave and foolhardy, and they died alone. DM Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.