I think most people do not pay for teachers' quality. People pay for the diploma's brand. (Which is a proxy of the probability of landing a good job after graduation.) For that use case, as long as the chatbot teachers don't degrade the university's brand name, I think most people won't care. They might even actually prefer it. (I graduated from the top engineering university in my country and I'd certainly prefer ChatGPT over the vast majority of the TAs I had).

This is not the solution you think it is. How do you determine how knowledgeable the chatbot is?

Or is 'the computer told me so it's correct' good enough these days?

> How do you determine how knowledgeable the chatbot is?

The same way you determine if a professor is knowledgeable -- they are employed by a school with certain level of reputation that you are comfortable to attend.

Considering degrees in CS are becoming less and less meaningful I personally wouldn't be investing in a branded one. Especially not in this economy.

That is something that I think hasn’t been fully realized yet - that many people will actually prefer AIs to most humans.

It is not just the brand, there is also the environment.

A good university will be full of smart people, student and teachers alike. You essentially learn by contact. There are also rich and influential people, who can provide you with great job opportunities.

It all goes hand in hand: the brand, teachers quality, student quality, the infrastructures,...

Worse teacher may affect the brand negatively, the smartest students may want to go elsewhere, the rich, who want to be with the smart will leave too, which will affect funding, meaning less infrastructure and be less attractive to the best teachers and researchers. It is all connected.

That's why I went to Berkeley /s

Jokes aside I'm sure our administration would salivate at deploying this for CS61A.

It is like saying the newspaper can just digitize the stories they were going to write anyway and keep selling the newspaper as they had before. That works until people stop buying the newspaper.

ChatGPT4 is better than any professor I ever had and it is not even close. Not to mention, the professors are not the ones who are going to get much better and smarter as time marches on from this point.

I am not even sure the credentialism from the Ivy league is going to make sense in an AI world.