#315: Can A.I. Replace College?

We are now living in the age of AI. What does this mean for those going to college or planning to go?

When I went to university, there was no internet yet – not for the everyday person. It came later, and what was there wasn’t very impressive. We had space to play around with it, but it was a shadow of what it has become. The idea that you have the library of all knowledge at your fingertips? No, not even in academia.

When I had to do my readings, I had to compete for making physical copies of maybe five copies of texts that were there for 100 plus students. Once you fought for the text, you were primed to read it. We also had to buy books or go to the library – probably both, because newer material wouldn’t be in the library. We really needed to fight to get even information, not yet knowledge. Information is naked facts lying outside; knowledge is how you contextualize and work with information.

Now we have different versions of classes – on campus and online. If you communicate mostly by keyboard and you’re given a complicated question you don’t know the answer to, you look things up. Or nowadays, you may have the temptation to use AI.

I can’t tell what I would do. I know that I use AI for some tasks. AI is good to help you get started on your thinking, to do a quick summary of something complicated, to have someone – or some “it” – run through what you’ve written to see whether it makes any sense. But so far, I have not used it to actually get creative work done.

If you play around with that, you figure out there’s a good reason you shouldn’t – because AI will make stuff up. Large language models seem to want to please you. They seem built to create the appearance of an answer.

I’ve had weird things happen. I recently tried to have it summarize more complicated texts and found out that it invented whole sections that weren’t even in the text, summarized them, and had opinions about it. I’ve seen it invent citations, come up with texts that don’t exist or that are completely marginal. That’s because of how it’s trained.

It’ll give you Wikipedia or anything publicly available, but Wikipedia is the equivalent of maybe middle or high school knowledge. For real knowledge, you need to dive deeper. Wikipedia does a good job telling you where to look, but it doesn’t give you the latest thinking in many ways because there’s a lag.

AI uses that and amplifies it. It also probably uses people’s blogs. I have a blog – I think it’s pretty informative, but it’s my views on things. It’s not objective. That’s not why you do a blog. I would be scared if people built their knowledge on what I personally have written. I’m fine if people read it, fine if people cite me, but don’t see me as the absolute truth.

Whatever AI delivers is maybe good enough to fool you, but its substance needs human touch. That may or may not change. I don’t think it’ll change substantially in the next years because I’ve actually seen it getting worse, partially because there’s active misinformation being fed into AI. As the old saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. The more texts AI finds, the more unverified texts it may find, making it more prone to misinformation.

Once you know that about AI, it tells you AI can be a good helper for some things, but don’t trust it completely. It may get better, but it’s not the same because even if you get an answer from AI, it is information, not knowledge. AI does not understand.

Given all of that, there’s still the temptation to use it. There are deadlines, performance pressure, insecurity – all of these things that people use for cheating. People typically don’t cheat if they have all the time in the world, have confidence, and are given space to develop their ideas with good feedback. None of that can always happen in higher education.

But you’re paying for your education. You’re paying to learn things and how to apply this knowledge. If you’re fortunate to live in a country where you don’t pay monetarily, you’re still paying with time or with side jobs. Everybody pays somehow for education. You could have been a plumber happily collecting money and experience rather than sitting in front of a screen or in a lecture hall.

Your investment should discourage you from using AI, because you’re not learning anything then. You may learn how to use AI, but what you’re skipping is training yourself to search for information, to collect knowledge, process it, put it into context, find and identify problems and ways to solve them – ideally doing this together with people. That’s what education is supposed to do. You’re learning technique, practice, application, social interactions, and how to deploy and develop your own voice.

If you skip all that, you won’t gain education, but just a simulation of education. You may say, “Well, fine, I’ll get my degree.” But the test is not the degree – the test is what you do in the workplace. If you have this degree, people expect you to be able to know all these things, to be able to do all these things, and to know how to develop and learn more.

The thing that AI does to us isn’t just that it may replace humans as knowledge seekers and evaluators, but that it also forces us all to escalate our own learning processes. These machines push us even more to keep learning. There’s no more standstill because whatever you learn at college is basically a case study. Things go on, things change.

The knowledge you gain at a college class will not go away, but it changes, accumulates, needs to be recontextualized and re-evaluated. Your task in college is to learn how to think, how to rethink, how to find applications, and much more. You don’t want to be replaced by AI eventually.

I’m not against using AI. I use it myself for tasks like creating quick transcripts, creating search engine optimized keywords for videos and texts. That’s what it’s very good at. You have to look it over, but it’s good and it saves time.

But you’re not coming here to just get a download of information. What I can do here is give you some evaluations, some thoughts, and hopefully some reason to rethink some of the things you’ve been thinking.

What you learn in college ideally is to think on your feet in any business environment – and education is also business. People expect you to know things and draw conclusions. If you’re in a room with others and you’re asked a question based on your education and practice, you can’t just say, “Let me Google this” or “Let me use ChatGPT for this.” Then they don’t have to hire you or keep you. You have to have your own perspective.

This creativity that we as human beings have – maybe one day AI can have that, but I would be careful about seeing that too soon. There’s still a moment within our foreseeable lifespans where human knowledge matters. I think in the future we will coexist with AI and maybe even artificial life.

What can education do for you, and why can AI sometimes stand in the way of that? Thank you very much. This is Erratic Attempts. I have not yet surrendered to the computer. I still want to be human, and I hope you want that too.

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YOUTUBE SEO OPTIMIZED DESCRIPTION

AI vs. Real Education: Why College Still Matters in 2025

In the age of artificial intelligence, what’s the real value of a college education? This video explores the critical differences between AI-generated information and genuine human knowledge, and why developing your own thinking skills matters more than ever.

Key Topics Covered:

• The fundamental difference between information and knowledge
• How AI can help (and hurt) your education
• Why AI hallucinates and invents false information
• The hidden dangers of over-relying on ChatGPT and other LLMs
• What you’re really paying for in higher education
• How to use AI as a tool without letting it replace your thinking
• Why workplace success requires more than just a degree
• The future of human knowledge in an AI-dominated world

Before the internet, students had to fight for physical copies of texts and dig deep for information. Today’s students face a different challenge: distinguishing between the convenience of AI-generated answers and the depth of real understanding. This video examines why the struggle to learn – not just access information – is what makes education valuable.

Main Insights: Large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and others are designed to please users by creating the appearance of answers, but they frequently fabricate information, invent citations, and summarize sections that don’t exist. They can amplify misinformation from sources like Wikipedia and blogs, giving you middle-school level knowledge when you need expert-level understanding.

Education isn’t about collecting information – it’s about learning to think critically, contextualize knowledge, identify problems, develop solutions, and cultivate your own voice. AI can help with transcripts, summaries, and SEO keywords, but it cannot replace the creative thinking, real-world application, and human insight that employers expect.

In the workplace, you won’t have time to Google answers or prompt ChatGPT during important meetings. You need internalized knowledge, practiced skills, and the ability to think on your feet. That’s what college develops – if you actually do the work instead of outsourcing it to AI.

The pressure of deadlines, performance anxiety, and insecurity may tempt students to use AI for assignments, but doing so means paying for education without actually receiving it. You’re investing time and money to develop capabilities that AI cannot give you: understanding, wisdom, and authentic expertise.

As AI continues to evolve, humans must escalate their own learning processes. The knowledge gained in college constantly needs recontextualization and re-evaluation. Your education is a case study, not a final answer – it’s teaching you how to continue learning and adapting throughout your career.

Bottom Line: AI is a useful tool for specific tasks, but it’s not a substitute for genuine learning. Human creativity, critical thinking, and original perspective remain irreplaceable. We haven’t surrendered to the computer yet – and we shouldn’t.

Related Topics: artificial intelligence in education, ChatGPT limitations, critical thinking skills, higher education value, AI hallucination problem, knowledge vs information, learning in the AI age, college worth it, educational technology, future of work, AI tools for students, academic integrity, lifelong learning, human vs artificial intelligence

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