Artificial intelligence is a sharp double-edged sword for universities

At the meeting of the Academic Council on 25 February 2026, we had a lively debate about the immediate and future consequences that artificial intelligence has and will have for universities.

Artificial intelligence received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence has enormous potential to do good—also within the health sciences.

The most prominent example is AlphaFold from Google DeepMind, which can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence with extremely high accuracy. 

This achievement resulted in a well-deserved Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 and will, among other things, significantly facilitate drug development.

Most people will be familiar with artificial intelligence through tools that can generate text, audio, and images. 

'The most widely used tool is ChatGPT from OpenAI, which reportedly has more than 800 million weekly users. Some of these users are students at Aarhus University, and this presents both opportunities and challenges. 

One of the early challenges concerns assessment and examination.

Do written assignments still make sense?

According to a recent opinion piece by Maja Horst and Niels O. Lehmann, respectively Dean and Vice-Dean at ARTS, the answer to this question is a clear “no.” In the piece, entitled “Written Assignments No Longer Prove Anything at All,” they argue that this form of coursework and examination has, with a wave of the wand from generative artificial intelligence, become obsolete. 

I am inclined to agree with them entirely and, moreover, believe that the same can be said of the PhD dissertation. An obvious consequence is that oral examinations should now be the rule rather than the exception.

In the opinion piece, Maja Horst and Niels O. Lehmann point out that the acute challenge surrounding examinations is merely an outpost of an AI-driven transformation of the entire university system—and of society as a whole. 

This is true. Since we can’t and should not put the genie back in the bottle, we must ensure that we educate graduates who are familiar with the technology and able to apply it for the benefit of society. 

This will require major changes to our teaching and to the research on which it is based—and it is urgent. As Maja Horst and Niels O. Lehmann put it in the opinion piece: “We must do everything at once. And we must do it now.”