AI and the Future of Academia

Conference.

Recent developments in Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini, enable anyone to produce swaths of polished, intelligent text without any special skills or knowledge. As technology advances, it becomes harder for even the most expert writers to compete with the quality and speed of text production by AI-generated tools. This phenomenon is only expected to escalate, leaving people far behind the superintelligence of machines that would prove either vastly superior to all humans or simply incomprehensible to them.

This development is likely to affect every industry and every profession, and academic scholarship is no exception. For hundreds of years, professors have been hired and promoted based almost entirely on their ability to produce high-quality texts fast enough to compete with their colleagues. When AI tools make the very skill that is the linchpin of academia irrelevant, it is hard to predict what will become of research-oriented universities.

This conference aims to start providing answers to the questions that should concern every academic. Is it inevitable that machines will leave behind all human scholars? If so, how should universities react to that in the execution of their three main roles: teaching, supervision, and research? Is machine-generated scholarship likely to suffer from failings that are impossible to fix without human intervention, and what kind of human intervention is feasible and desirable? Finally, when machine intelligence emerges into insights that are beyond human understanding, but can nevertheless guide human societies toward prosperity, what role, if any, would be left for human scholars?

Speakers

• Anja Møller Pedersen – University of Copenhagen
• Anne-Sophie Guernon – McGill University
• Brian Earp – National University of Singapore
• Christoph Engel – ETH Zurich
• Gregor Maucec – University of Liverpool
• Henrik Palmer Olsen – University of Copenhagen
• Jurčys Paulius – Vilniaus University
• Matthijs Maas – University of Cambridge
• Patrick Barry – University of Michigan
• Sebastian Porsdam Mann – University of Copenhagen
• Shai Dothan – University of Copenhagen
• Shanshan Xu – University of Copenhagen
• Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen – University of Copenhagen

Registration

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Preliminary programme