OpenAI on campus: ‘little choice but to be complicit’

Tech giant OpenAI has launched an inaugural student ambassador programme across campuses worldwide, sparking concern that AI is deepening its foothold in the higher education sector in problematic ways. 

Two undergraduate students per campus have been selected as “OpenAI campus leads”, and their role is to champion AI tools and support their peers to use them effectively.

OpenAI Student Collective started this month and runs until June 2027. It is open to students from the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, India, Japan and South Korea. 

Campus leads are expected to commit four to six hours per week to the programme. Responsibilities include hosting four workshops per semester and running weekly co-working sessions for students.

OpenAI provides campus leads with a subscription to ChatGPT and credits for the firm’s coding agent, Codex. Campus leads also receive merchandise, an invitation to visit OpenAI HQ in San Francisco, as well as a stipend.  

Julie Chung and Sophia Xu have been selected as the two OpenAI campus leads at New York University. They started their roles earlier this week after a round of interviews in the summer.

Chung told Times Higher Education that their shared goal for the programme was to “go beyond” teaching students how to use AI for university assignments and think bigger.

“We want to foster a community of builders,” said Chung.

“We want people to use AI to do the tedious tasks and automate [them] while they…focus on other things, like human connection and building more creative ideas.”

Both women use AI in their own lives; Chung uses it for sending automatic email marketing campaigns in her part-time job in the real estate sector, and Xu said she is using AI to help her find a summer internship.

Many universities encourage their students to use AI in certain circumstances to prepare them for the workplace and some have negotiated campus-wide access to some AI platforms. Last year, for instance, the University of Oxford reportedly became the first UK university to offer access to the education version of artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT to all of its students and staff. And last week it was reported that the university has allowed OpenAI to train its newest models on the Bodleian Library collections.

Nor is it unprecedented for companies to hire campus ambassadors to establish brand loyalty. Famously, Red Bull has hired student ambassadors since 1987. But according to Deborah Lupton, a digital sociologist and professor at UNSW Sydney, OpenAI’s move is “incredibly unethical” and “very exploitative” because it risks encouraging excessive dependency on AI.

She said the firm was “following the big tobacco playbook. Or even big pharma playbook...For example, big pharma pays doctors to go to conferences and [gives them] little gadgets [to have] on their desk.”

She said OpenAI was “basically targeting vulnerable people: students who don’t have much money, who are frightened and uncertain about their job prospects…It’s kind of encouraging them [students] to become even more dependent on these services by making them the ambassadors.”

Ella Hafermalz, associate professor of work and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said she does not “blame” students for being interested in these roles, which can feel prestigious. But she said universities have a responsibility to offer clearer guidance about the use of AI. “Otherwise, we risk letting big AI shape a generation’s path from education into work.” 

“Universities need to be very alert to the threat that these big AI organisations pose. OpenAI are not just a provider of tools: they are a potential competitor for universities,” she asserted.

As an academic “curious” about emerging technologies, Hafermalz added she is not fundamentally against the use of generative technologies. But she said the OpenAI Student Collective, combined with the ways that a lot of students use ChatGPT, affords the technology company a greater level of access to students than universities typically possess.

“We don’t know all about our students’ lives and we don’t need to. Our focus is on learning…meanwhile, commercial technology companies are just getting further and further embedded into our higher education systems.”

According to Lilian Edwards, emerita professor of law and technology at Newcastle University and director of Pangloss Consulting, universities have “little choice but to be complicit” in the campus leads programme.

“Pressurised, already deskilled students, love this stuff, and student satisfaction results call many shots,” she continued. “One can castigate such universities as complicit with the OpenAI slop campaign trail, but the economics for both parties mean, without regulatory intervention, things will inexorably head in the direction of degree by AI in all but the elite.”

UNSW’s Lupton also endorsed this view. “What can universities actually do about it?” she asked. “It’s big AI running the show here...directly targeting students. They’re leaving out the middle person, which is the universities.”

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com