Abstract

This essay is a prompt response to Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley’s essay “AI and the University as a Service” published in the most recent issue of PMLA. I diagnose the anticipated problem of higher education in the era of AI as the “global digitalization of the university and language.” By the digitalization of the university, I mean the online circulation of recorded courses. By the digitalization of language, my approach broadens to refer not only to the proliferation of online resources but also the dissemination of language into machine-readable units and their redistribution. My positionality in interpreting these kinds of digitalization is global, involving multilingual, multicultural contexts. The possibilities and challenges concern the use of LLMs for language education and writing pedagogy in higher education in two aspects: 1) whether it is justifiable to train students using the language of LLM outputs based on statistical probability rather than communicative intent; 2) how to decolonize the English monopoly on language education and data structures. My suggestions are open-ended, reminding us humanists of the Korean resources that are widely accessible and the co-evolutionary approach of writing with AI. All we need in future higher education may be APT (AI Personal Training).