[Reubend]

> A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.

The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.

[frereubu]

If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. It happens here too, and its really annoying because often the article has a much more nuanced picture than the headline would have you believe. In an era when people do read the article after reading the headline it's somewhat forgivable - getting someone's attention then they get the nuance, but in the internet era when people just read the headline it's anachronistic.

[kibwen]

> If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline.

This has been the case for essentially all newspapers since time immemorial. Reporters write the articles, editors write the headlines.

[js2]

While true, NYT took a clear turn towards clickbait headlines in the last 5-10 years. It used to have more self-respect.

[kibwen]

I don't discount that it's possible that NYT headline policy could have changed in the last decade, but sensationalism when it comes to newspaper headlines is the historical norm. "Clickbait" is an ancient phenomenon:

"In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens notes sensationalism can be found in the Ancient Roman gazette Acta Diurna, where official notices and announcements were presented daily on public message boards, the perceived content of which spread with enthusiasm in illiterate societies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism

[jatora]

You're fooling yourself if you think newspapers and news media in general haven't always been about attention-baiting.

[js2]

Sure, if it bleeds it leads. But I've been a news consumer since the 1980s and a reader of the NYT almost as long as it's had a web site. It is my strong impression that its headlines have gotten noticeably worse. The main one that annoys me, and I don't actually see an example of it on the main page right now, is the teaser headline that forces you to click through to know what the article is even about[^1].

Edit: here's an example. Headline on the front page is "A Chaotic, Confusing Campaign: Here’s Who Should Be the Next Governor of California". Makes it sound like you're clicking through to an endorsement, right? Nope, the article is actually a voter guide. It's a completely misleading headline.

[^1]: You can often inspect the URL to see the original descriptive headline before the clickbaiters got to it which makes it even more annoying.

[satvikpendem]

Blame the economics of the Internet. Companies use clickbait because it works, there have been many examples of this, and if a company wants to stay revenue generating in this day and age it must use clickbait.

[reactordev]

It’s all AI now

[donohoe]

At the NYT? I don’t doubt AI is used in figuring out headlines but ultimately a human makes the decision.

[falcor84]

Quite funny to think that we might have AI models meticulously nudging newspaper editors in order to carefully control the public's Overton Window about AI, playing some 5d chess.

[Cyclone_]

There has been quite a few articles in that paper where the headline is really designed to be clickbait.

[donohoe]

That was true 29, 40, 80 years ago

[dang]

We've replaced the baity title* with your neutral description of the article. Thanks!

(* in keeping with this site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[bbor]

Yeah that title is absurd, tho it did make me read the whole thing out of pure incredulity. The “tearing itself apart” apparently refers to the fact that the CSU system spent $16M on AI tools during a $2B+ budget deficit, which… yeah. Doesn’t take an economics professor to see the problem with that thesis!

The author does seem interested in supporting the headline, but I think they're too good of a journalist to pull off the outrage. It mainly comes through in passages like this:

  After I pointed out to Janos that Marx himself would have had a field day with MarxGPT, he laughed… by interacting with ChatGPT, he and his students solidified its role in the public education ecosystem; and their ability to do so was the result of the transfer of almost $17 million of worker-generated public funds to a private, for-profit company. 

If this wasn’t the NYT, I’d assume this was a joke. Sadly, I think it is indeed intended as something of a slam dunk…

They do get to AI critics eventually, though obviously ‘activists dislike X’ isn’t really proof for ‘X is tearing us apart[, Lisa!]’. Namely,

  “We feel like a guinea pig for what A.I. is going to do to higher education,” Kenney said. The embrace of generative A.I., she went on, is “a step down the path of creating a really different kind of future citizen and worker.” This kind of student would be intellectually passive, less likely to see themselves as agents of their own lives.

I think everyone would agree they’re “guinea pigs”, as are we all in a way — such is the curse of living in interesting times. The rest seems pretty plainly speculative, though.

  This winter, the [critics at SFSU] circulated a petition asking the chancellor’s office to invest in protecting faculty jobs and academic programs rather than renew the OpenAI contract.

…hopefully an economics professor chimes in!

[laughingcurve]

Classic NYT