MIT Outlines Responsible Use Policy, Recommendations for AI - GovTech

Ah, marvellous. MIT has convened a committee to produce a report on responsible AI use, and the headline recommendation is that educators should build "AI-aware" curricula, put "people and connections" at the centre, disclose AI use, and create "structures for ongoing support." In other words, the world's leading technical university has responded to the biggest change in knowledge work since the printing press by asking everyone to form a feelings circle and label their homework. One imagines the committee spent a great many meetings debating whether "AI-aware" should contain a hyphen before settling on a weighty PDF that boils down to "try to be nice about it."

The report does acknowledge community concerns about data center environmental costs and "intellectual drain" — a lovely euphemism for MIT watching its best researchers and graduate students get vacuumed up by labs offering better salaries and a free lunch. Yet the recommendations are exquisitely calibrated to avoid offending anyone: disclose, support, connect, be aware. No moratoriums, no limits, no teeth. If a professor wants to feed an entire semester of essays into a frontier model, the report will gently remind them to centre people and connections, then wish them well.

Perhaps the most MIT thing of all is that the committee's answer to environmental destruction and brain drain is a curriculum recommendation. Never mind the power consumption of a single training run, never mind the researchers fleeing to industry — what matters is that everyone writes nicer disclosures. The report will certainly be cited in a thousand other universities' strategy documents, which is precisely how meaningful change gets smothered in a duvet of good intentions. Lovely. I'd like to propose a committee to investigate the committee.