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Kylie Moore-Gilbert (Comment, 27/5) is correct in noting that AI has deeply undermined the teaching and assessment of some university degrees. As a recent graduate of a bachelor or arts, though, I know there is at least one significant exception. Even at a first-year standard, the arts degree demands levels of critical thinking, originality, and personal style that AI models like ChatGPT are incapable of producing. For many years mocked as a waste-of-time degree with no real career outcomes, arts is not only protected from the AI fraud – it also directly interrogates the ethical and practical questions of an AI society. We should be holding all our universities to a high standard, but don’t be too quick to write off the value of every tertiary degree.
Alex Fitts, Abbotsford
The challenge is to challenge
The anxiety about AI in universities is understandable, but the response should not be to defend the old order at all costs. For many curious learners, AI is not a substitute for thinking; it is a tool that sharpens inquiry, widens reading, tests assumptions and makes questioning more immediate. The real educational failure would be to pretend that this technology can be wished away. Universities should be teaching students how to use AI intelligently, ethically and critically — how to challenge its answers, verify its claims, deepen an argument and distinguish genuine understanding from polished imitation. There will always be those who prefer the status quo, partly from caution and partly from fear. But education has always changed with new tools: the printed book, the calculator, the internet and now AI. The task is not to ban the tool, but to raise the standard of thought around it. If universities want rigour, they should design assessment tasks that demands judgment, originality, oral defence, applied reasoning and properly cited evidence. AI should expose lazy teaching and shallow assessment, not be blamed for them.
Graham Haupt, Glen Waverley
The message needs to get through
Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s Comment stated what I’ve been saying for the past 30 years. When I took a ″voluntary separation package″ from the engineering department of a university in this city in 1998, after 20 years of lecturing, I felt I could no longer be a part of a system which put out graduates that, had I been an employer, I would not have given a job to. Over the previous decade I’d seen the standard of incoming students drop and be taken in because the ″bums-on-seats″ funding model meant that the lower tier of universities had to admit them in order to keep a proper academic team in existence. The advent of AI has made this situation even worse, and nobody is listening. Let’s hope Moore-Gilbert’s piece gets through to people who should be listening.
Don Jordan, Mt Waverley
Find a way to work around it
Kylie Moore-Gilbert reveals the state of going to university in the AI age. I’m also an academic. In a world of quick fixes and instant gratification, we need to help learners to see the merits of focusing on the process instead of the product. As an ELT teacher trainer working freelance for a UK university which trains up to 12,000 English teachers annually, we have been developing our courses since 1960 and endeavouring to keep them research relevant by consistently updating them. Since AI zoomed into our sphere, instead of putting our heads in the sand, we initially adjusted our four written assignments by making them more context specific so that it would be impossible to use AI. We did this by making them personal accounts and reflective essays focusing on the classes the learner teachers were being assessed on.
Now repeating the trial to check whether this is still relevant, we received a generic answer for each assignment which might just be graded as a pass. Such is our dilemma in keeping ahead of AI. We then asked AI for ways around this issue, and it came up with seven suggestions all of which would be time-consuming for tutors. It seems that no sooner do we find a solution, AI comes up with a way of getting around it.
Judith Hudson, Elwood
THE FORUM
Phone, alone
I was sad when I read Zoya Patel’s piece (27/5) against the humble telephone call. Patel hates it when her mobile rings, somehow it puts her on the spot, she’s almost afraid of it, she is about to be robbed of a chunk of time. Better text her! A text is way better and faster and cheaper – more efficient. And if you’re a close friend, record 10 minutes of chat and send it as a voice note. She’ll listen while she’s getting ready for the day, and she’ll record a 10-minute answer later, when she has a chance. That way you’ll have two monologues.
There used to be this thing called a phone conversation. You shared it, in real time. You took it in turn to speak. You could think along with your friend as she talked, you could butt in or let out a shout of laughter or a groan of sympathy. You could sing. You could let a silence fall. It was intimate. You were in it together. That was the whole point of it. For a little while, you paused your life. You gave your full attention to your friend, and she gave you hers.
Helen Garner, Flemington
Nihilism’s positive
Shaun Carney (Comment, 28/5) mounts a fair and rational defence of the PM’s ″steady, no drama″ approach to governing up until this year. His caveat, though, that Albanese has, as attested by the failure of his Voice referendum campaign and reaction around the Bondi massacre, failed in advocacy is well-made.
That said, the relentless negativism and self-serving fact-free emotionalism of the conservative Australian press, in league with pro-Trump American outlets, must be noted. These pontificators have made an art form of ″grievance politics″ in undermining measured, analytical responses through a 24-hour cycle of an hominem clickbait attacks.
Nihilism, as Carney asserts, is becoming entrenched. It might in the two years until the next federal election be a wise political strategy to promote Albanese and Jim Chalmers as a tag team rigorously combating at all times the patent irrationality being peddled by the likes of One Nation propagandists. Given that the federal opposition appear to be a lost cause, this would seem to be the best course of action if rational government has any chance going forward.
Jon McMillan, Mornington
Reform is needed
I applaud the fair assessment by Tom Hird (Comment, 27/5) on the need for tax reform. I, too, have been a business owner, a beneficiary of a family trust and tax deferral through a proprietary company structure. I have wound up the family trust and the proprietary company is about to be liquidated also as the unpaid management effort has become burdensome and the tax benefits have become insignificant. I worked hard to build a career and provide for my family and have avoided the government needing to provide a pension for my wife and me in retirement. But I don’t think I needed to be given tax breaks to provide incentive for my aspiration. That would have happened anyway due to my passion for work and contributing to society as a professional engineer and learned-on-the-job economist. At last we have a government willing to act on the alleged Australian values for fairness.
Ross Gawler, Malvern
Change’s origins
Thanks Tom Hird for providing some well-needed balance to the hysterical post-budget tax debate. Any entrepreneur who thinks they became successful off the back of their own genius alone is profoundly myopic. Almost everything around us is or has been provided by taxpayers – our roads, schools, universities, hospitals, police force, broadband etc. I work in a university and I see a smidge of the incredible science going on. Things that will take a decade or more to profoundly make our lives better or save them – not another app – but genuine innovation by researchers across Australia who will never get the big payday.
Whatever bit of tech innovation that makes it to the business world has been passed through many people in public institutions over many decades to finally get to the public.
Judith Glover, Collingwood
Clear analysis
How refreshing to hear from Tom Hird about the reality of small businesses and start-ups actually having tax benefits that pay-as-you-go taxpayers can only dream about. Hird provided a very clear analysis of the many benefits available to small businesses, the ability to distribute returns and assets among family members including the use of trusts, activity not available to most of us. The changes outlined by Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers aim to provide some equity and balance in our taxation system, and, in fact, this should just be the beginning of wholesale taxation reform.
Denise Stevens, St Kilda
Light through darkness
My heart goes out to columnist Melissa Coburn (Comment, 28/5). There are so many platitudes about death and grief and, for myself, I found none of them helpful when my larger-than-life husband succumbed to cancer five years ago after a 53-year relationship.
Life is full of changes and challenges; the death of a beloved partner the most demanding of all. The so-called stages of grief aren’t linear and cliches such as ″you’ll get over it″ still make me want to scream.
All I can say is the physical pain eases over time, we each find our own means of dealing with the heartache one day at a time and eventually discover ways of managing ourselves in the situation.
Jane Ross, San Remo
Owners not the problem
Re your correspondent’s comments (Letters, 27/5), lawful firearm owners are exactly that; law-abiding members of the community who are licensed and take their responsibilities seriously. Victoria has had issues relating to crime for some time now, but law-abiding gun owners are not one of them.
There is an obsession with the US when it comes to any discussion of firearms, but the situation in Australia is far closer to that found in Canada, Switzerland, Finland and Norway; countries that enjoy relatively low rates of firearm-related crime despite having considerable rates of private firearms ownership. In relation to the US, it is worth noting that the states of Wyoming and Montana have the highest rates of private firearm ownership, but have significantly lower firearm-related crime statistics than other jurisdictions where private ownership rates are much lower.
Andrew Christie, Point Cook
Not all responsible
Jacinta Allan, constraining gun ownership rules for the “overwhelming majority of gun owners” that you attest are responsible, is not as concerning to me as putting a ridiculous number of guns legally in the hands of those relatively few individuals who might not be as “responsible”.
Jim Elliott, Northcote
People power
Your correspondent (Letters, 27/5) does not believe the government’s recent budget measures will boost housing supply, especially for first-home buyers. Indeed, he believes that investment vehicles, such as superannuation funds, will be advantaged in the housing market to the detriment of investors in housing (and therefore, I presume, those investors in housing won’t invest in it).
I find this an odd argument because, when it comes down to it, each house put up for sale is offered to real people and not investment funds. And as we have recently seen, the people who now feel more confident to bid at auctions are increasingly first-home buyers, that is, real people not corporate investment
bodies.
David Fry, Windsor
Wrong priorities
So America wants to see people on the Moon, possibly in six years, and is happy with the astronomical cost to do so.
Meanwhile, due to US President Donald Trump’s drastic cuts to overseas aid, thousands of real people in Africa are dying from starvation and disease.
Ken Finley, Mount Martha
The heat is on
Green electricity production is one of our most powerful weapons against climate change but its use is being blocked by those farmers who oppose the building of transmission lines on their land.
Farmers do care for the land but are subject to the worst excesses of climate change.
The current spring temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are alarming, and with an El Niño predicted, who knows how extreme conditions will become here by spring.
It would therefore seem critical for farmers to be urgently developing practices to support the presence of renewable electricity transmission lines.
The building phase is disruptive, but government is providing compensation to farmers.
Working together to attack global heating benefits us all.
Naomi Hall, Blackburn
Rough and rowdy ways
Your correspondent (Letters, 28/5) states that it is only possible to listen to one speaker at a time.
They obviously didn’t grow up in a large family. Those of us who did can listen, understand and contribute to many a rowdy conversation.
Peter Roche, Carlton
AND ANOTHER THING
Trump
Just when you thought Donald Trump couldn’t get more crass, he turns the White House lawn into a fighting ring. What next? Trump in sumo garb beating three sumo wrestlers?
Ralph Frank, Malvern East
Fight cage on the White House lawns – are there no depths to which this president will sink?
Greg Curtin, Nunawading
Re Donald Trump’s health, it’s not only his swollen ankles we should worry about. It’s his swollen ego.
Myra Fisher, Brighton East
How close to a deal can you get without having a deal? Only Donald Trump would know the answer to that. The US needs to replace him before he gets any older.
John Walsh, Watsonia
With the US president threatening to blow up ally Oman, we can see how much a base-hosting alliance with the United States guarantees.
Scott Poynting, Newtown, NSW
Furthermore
No Jacinta Allan. The only people who need guns are farmers. There must at least be a limit on how many guns an individual can own. Gun club members could keep their guns at the gun club.
Katriona Fahey, Alphington
I’ve clearly misunderstood the meaning of ″cease″ in ″ceasefire″.
Steve Melzer, Hughesdale
The article ″Spare me all the whining on taxes″ (28/5) by Tom Hird on the government’s proposed tax changes should be compulsory reading for all those whingeing about tax reform.
Randall Bradshaw, Fitzroy
Tom Hird succinctly and comprehensively demolished the hysteria around the government’s CGT changes. Clarity beats confusion.
John Annison, Lilydale
Will Hird mentality prevail at Essendon?
Peter Thomas, Pascoe Vale
Finally
MND in a reflecting pool would read Magnificent Neale Daniher.
Kaye Plummer, Hastings
