Day: November 30, 2025

• A University of Texas professor says AI didn’t break college — it revealed how broken teaching was.
• Steven Mintz said that mass lectures and formulaic essays dehumanized education long before AI.
• He said that schools must automate rote learning so humans can focus on thinking and mentorship.

When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched.

In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn’t a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis.

For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants.

Professors have called this mentorship, he said, but it’s really “industrialized education,” he wrote in a more detailed Substack post on the topic. And AI, he believes, has simply revealed how hollow that model had become.

“Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do — and often do it better,” Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. “When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the assignment.”

The death of the take-home essay

In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is obsolete because it tests exactly what AI now excels at — research, understanding context, and constructing and developing an argument.

“AI can now do all that,” he said.

As a result, he said he has moved away from essays done outside class and toward forms of assessment that demonstrate visible learning, including in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions.

There should be “no outside of class graded assignments. Assessment will be based exclusively on activities that can be observed in person,” he said.

Mintz envisions a system where AI handles what he called “mastery learning” — basic facts, chronology, and conceptual frameworks — freeing students to focus on what he described as “inquiry learning”: asking students to pose questions and construct complex arguments.

He believes schools should double down on timeless literacies — research, writing, numeracy, and critical reading — but in ways that demand creativity and independent thought.

“We must ensure that students graduate with the ability to conduct research, write and speak clearly and analytically, read closely and critically, be numerate, culturally literate, and well prepared for their future career,” he said.

If universities continue with “business as usual,” he said, public faith in higher education and the value of a degree will “wither.”

A final reckoning for higher ed

For Mintz, AI is a mirror, showing universities how deeply they’ve relied on mechanical learning, and how far they’ve drifted from the roots of education.

“AI doesn’t threaten to dehumanize higher education,” he wrote on Substack. ” It reveals how thoroughly we’ve already dehumanized it — and offers us one last chance to recover what we’ve lost.”

Looking ahead, he told Business Insider that the next five years must be a period of reinvention.

“We must reinvent assessment,” he said, and offer courses that center on “slow reading, deep questions, ethical dilemmas, historical reasoning, data fluency, and creative problem-solving.”

“We must invest in seminars, mentorship models, undergraduate research, and experiential learning,” he said.

Now, colleges face a choice: double down on surveillance and standardization, or rebuild around what machines can’t replicate.

“This is our moment to redesign — not defend — the future of learning,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

• Employees who reshape their jobs around AI report higher engagement and motivation at work.
• Multiverse found that “job crafting” with AI cuts down on low-effort, low-quality “AI slop.”
• Deeper AI collaboration links to higher focus, energy, and commitment, the researchers said.

Tired of “AI slop“? A team of learning scientists at AI skills platform Multiverse says there’s a fix.

Employees who take the initiative to reshape their roles around artificial intelligence — rather than simply using it to speed through tasks — are more engaged, motivated, and creative at work, according to new research from Multiverse, the upskilling platform for AI and tech adoption.

The study, conducted in June and July, analyzed 295 UK full-time professionals across industries, including finance, government, and technology, all of whom had used generative AI for at least six months.

It found that those who actively “job craft” — redesign their tasks and workflows to integrate AI — experience significantly higher engagement than those who use the technology passively.

“Job crafting essentially means reexamining the components of your role and reshaping them to suit the needs of the task at hand,” Barry Goulding, an organizational psychologist at Multiverse, told Business Insider.

“So moving from ‘this is my job’ to ‘this is how I could do my job better.'”

‘AI slop’ comes from low engagement

The Multiverse team sees “AI slop” — the flood of low-quality, generic output produced by generative AI — as a symptom of disengagement rather than a flaw of the technology itself.

“AI slop is a function of employees not properly engaging with the tech,” Goulding said.

“Copy-pasting a report written by AI without reviewing or revising it isn’t an indicator of a highly engaged employee, nor does it suggest that they are deeply collaborating with the AI tool they’re using,” he added.

Job crafters, on the other hand, he said, are the ones who “catch errors, question the AI’s logic, and ultimately ensure the final product is high-quality.”

By training employees to think critically about how AI fits into their role, companies can curb sloppy output and foster higher-quality work, he added.

AI engagement isn’t automatic — it depends on intent

The findings also challenged a popular narrative that AI reduces cognitive engagement.

While some studies, including OpenAI and MIT’s research on ChatGPT and Oxford University Press’s study on AI tools, have found that AI can cause people to think less deeply, Multiverse’s data suggests that when used intentionally, AI can actually increase focus and dedication.

“If the intent is low-effort automation, you’ll no doubt see low cognitive and employee engagement,” Goulding said.

“But our data shows that when employees use AI with intent, and proactively reshape their job around it, their absorption, dedication, and vigor (the factors that make up employee engagement) increase.”

Goulding said this proactive mindset helps employees move from a passive to an active relationship with AI.

He cited a customer service manager, for instance, who could go beyond answering tickets one by one and instead use AI to analyze trends and recommend process improvements.

That kind of mindset shift, he added, “can provoke a real uptick in work engagement.”

How leaders can make ‘job crafting’ part of their AI strategy

To harness these benefits, Goulding said AI adoption needs to go beyond rolling out new tools.

“Handing out licenses to AI tools without training employees in how to use them is pretty much guaranteed to ensure lower-quality outputs, low engagement, and negligible impact on productivity,” he said.

He recommends embedding training within broader AI strategies, measuring outcomes, and giving employees space to experiment.

Leadership, he added, plays a crucial role in setting expectations and modelling the right behaviour.

“Give employees the agency to reshape their roles and the licence to experiment within guardrails,” Goulding said. “Lead from the front.”

He pointed to the consulting firm Capita as an example of a company that has made AI adoption a strategic transition, rather than just a tech rollout.

One employee there, after being trained in AI, built an “Ask Me Anything” assistant that has already handled more than 70,000 queries across the firm, he said.

Don’t track job crafting — track what it drives

Rather than trying to measure “job crafting” directly, Goulding advised leaders to focus on the outcomes it’s meant to drive.

“You won’t see value if you’re just trying to track a behavior,” he said.

“It’s more important to measure the output and impact you’re after: is productivity improving? Are employee engagement scores going up?”

He added that training people to use AI effectively within their context naturally leads to curiosity, problem-solving, and higher-quality collaboration with the technology.

Goulding said he believes job crafting will soon become a core competency for the AI era.

“AI will change how we all work,” he said. “Those who grab hold of the reins will win quicker and win bigger than those that don’t — and the benefits will multiply at an organizational level if you can embed these behaviours through tech training.”

• I’ve been on dozens of trips with my kid and have never liked the cheap souvenirs they ask for.
• Now I put that money toward something way more memorable: local cooking classes.
• The unique classes offer wonderful experiences and provide us with recipes to make back home.

I’ve traveled to dozens of countries with my children and criss-crossed the United States, taking them along for the ride. I like to think that photos and our memories are the only mementos we need to commemorate our trips. However, my kids disagree.

Despite my best efforts, we picked up a lot of junk during our early trips. We came home with stuffed animals that my kids promptly tossed in a pile and never thought about again. We bought an endless number of keychains that fell off my children’s backpacks within days and novelty t-shirts emblazoned with UK flags or seashells from the Bahamas that my kids absolutely had to have, but found embarrassing to wear once we returned home.

I was tired of spending money on souvenirs that made my children, ever so briefly, happy in the moment but ultimately created clutter and stress. Eventually, I found a solution. Now, there is one souvenir I look forward to getting on every trip that takes up no space in my suitcase: a recipe for a favorite local dish.

Reining in our souvenir purchases left us with more time and money for experiences

At first, my kids were disappointed when I started saying “no” to their requests for souvenirs. To my children’s dismay, many snow globes and miniature replicas of iconic buildings like the Eiffel Tower were left behind on store shelves.

Slowly, my children came to accept that we would no longer buy these trinkets, and we stopped lingering at the gift shop at every attraction we visited. The time and money we saved allowed us to focus more on experiences while traveling.

My family discovered a love of cooking classes

Although I had nixed cheap souvenirs, I still wanted my kids to have something to help them remember their trip, besides photos. I decided to lean into experiences. I wanted them to have something that would bring them back to adventures together in ways plastic trinkets never could. One of the new experiences we tried was cooking classes abroad.

I am, admittedly, not the best in the kitchen. However, my children love to cook and will gladly whip up a batch of cookies or baked pasta with minimal supervision. When we went to Rome, my pizza-obsessed son wanted nothing more than to take a class to learn how to make authentic pies in the very country where his favorite food was invented.

I wasn’t sure my kids would have the stamina to make it through the class. However, they did great and we had a lot of fun. We learned more than I expected about Italian cooking and culture, and enjoyed eating our freshly baked homemade pizza after the class was over.

Even better, we left with a great recipe for authentic Neapolitan pizza, which turned out to be our favorite souvenir of all time. Now, my kids ask to take a cooking class wherever we go.

The recipes we collect from cooking classes are our favorite souvenirs

Since our first cooking class in Rome, we have taken classes in Petra, Jordan, and Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan. Each time, we spend a few hours with a local chef learning about life in the area we are visiting and its food traditions.

We always get great tips about local hidden gems and the best restaurants that don’t make the guidebooks. Plus, there is always a delicious meal we made with our own hands at the end.

The classes are often in unique locations

In Tokyo, my children and I wandered down alleys until we found the small kitchen marked by a red lantern, where we had our class. We laughed as we stomped on the dough we had kneaded to perfection, flattening it enough to roll into noodles. My son took it as a point of pride that he was selected to assemble the final bowls of ramen.

In Kyoto, we visited a chef’s home to learn how to prepare all the ingredients that go into a traditional bento box. My children poked fun at my inability to cut my sushi rolls into evenly spaced pieces, yet again proving their superiority in the kitchen.

In Petra, we visited a local restaurant to learn how to prepare a feast of Jordanian specialties, including salads and traditional lentil and rice dishes.

The cooking classes we take aren’t only fun and educational, they are also the source of our favorite and most used souvenirs. At the end of each cooking class, we walk away with recipes for the dishes we cooked, from ramen to falafel. These recipes have become more than instructions for assembling dinner. They are memories we can literally feel and taste, ones that can take us back, instantly, to some of our favorite times, and they are far more valuable than any t-shirt.

• E-commerce entrepreneurs are using live selling platforms to grow their businesses.
• Live selling requires minimal equipment. Many top sellers got started with their phones.
• The key to retaining viewers is engaging with them and building an online community.

E-commerce entrepreneurs are experimenting with app-based live selling — the new-age QVC, if you will — and some of them, through charisma, charm, and an ability to connect with buyers in real time, are moving heaps of product.

You don’t need a lot of money or equipment to hop on the trend. Most live sellers Business Insider spoke with started streaming from their home offices or basements with an iPhone.

However, you do need to tap into your extroversion.

“You’ve got to talk to people,” said Clinton Benninghoff, who started streaming on the auction-based platform Whatnot in 2024. His gift of gab made up for a lack of understanding of nearly everything in the live selling space.

“I had no idea what I was doing. That first day, I think I was live for like 20 minutes. I sold a putter, and everybody in my stream was actually telling me how to stream.”

He’s been working at a Midland-based golf apparel and equipment store, Golf Headquarters, since 2011. Going live on Whatnot has “drastically changed our business,” he said. According to a screenshot of his seller dashboard, The GHQ Crew has brought in more than $1 million in 2025 from Whatnot.

Benninghoff and other top sellers explained how any e-commerce entrepreneur can incorporate live selling into their sales strategy in two steps.

1. Start with what you already have and put in sweat equity

Since the stakes are relatively low, don’t overthink the production quality. Sign up for Whatnot, TikTok Shop, Palmstreet, or any other live selling platform — note that you’ll have to apply to sell, and different platforms may have different seller criteria — and commit to learning as you go.

“Everything doesn’t have to be perfect,” said Casey Wehr, who started selling sports cards out of his home office with his two sons in late 2023. “The time we said, ‘let’s do it,’ to the time that we turned on the first show was probably a week.”

Over the last two years, their store, Krunk Cards, has generated millions in sales, and Wehr has hired a team of five, including one employee whose sole responsibility is to procure inventory.

Don’t expect to make millions right away. Val Zapata, who turned her sneaker-collecting hobby into a seven-figure business through live selling, described her first Whatnot show as “mayhem.”

“I made like 50 bucks. I was probably negative after the boxes,” she added.

The more you go live, the more opportunities you have to make sales and the better you’ll get at engaging with viewers.

Initially, Zapata hosted daily shows from her childhood home, where she was living at the time, for multiple hours at a time.

“I would wake up so fried from eight or nine hours of really high-intense energy, because we bring the show,” said Zapata, whose setup consisted of an iPad and a $15 desk ring light. Her backdrop was a couple of racks of sneakers.

2. Engage with your viewers and build a community

Your product is important. That’s e-commerce 101.

“You want to make sure that you have the inventory that generates the excitement and demand for viewers to want to bid,” said Wehr, who carefully follows the trends in the sports card industry and pays attention to which athletes are performing well.

But a good product can only get you so far in the live selling space.

“To have a big viewership and a big community, you’ve got to engage with those people,” said Benninghoff. “You’ve got to make them feel like they are family — not just a person buying items from you.”

Benninghoff has found success by simply being the same person on camera as he is in real life.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is to just be myself,” he said. “Because people respect you if you’re transparent and honest with them.”

• Thrive Capital partner Philip Clark said that AI is augmenting engineering jobs — not substituting them.
• Clark said that he couldn’t think of one company he’d invested in that “laid off engineers because of these tools.”
• “You can actually make everyone the 10x or proverbial 100x engineer in a really exciting way,” he said on “Sourcery.”

AI code editors are radically changing the job of a software engineer — but not eliminating jobs entirely, a Thrive Capital investor says.

Philip Clark has witnessed the rise of vibe coding tools firsthand. At Thrive Capital, he’s worked on the firm’s investments in OpenAI — which debuted its Codex AI coding tool in May — as well as Cursor. In September, Clark was promoted to partner.

Clark was optimistic about the future of engineering jobs during a recent interview on the “Sourcery” podcast.

“I’m an investor in a lot of companies that use AI tools,” he said. “I cannot think — especially on the coding side and engineering side — of a single one that has laid off engineers because of these tools.”

Clark said that companies in his investment portfolio might be able to “grow without adding quite as much headcount,” but that job elimination was not happening.

“Will there be some turnover in economic centers?” he said. “Of course, there always is. But it’s actually been much more of an augmenting technology than a substituting technology.”

There has yet to be substantive data about AI-related engineering cuts. Hiring appears to be down — software engineer job postings on Indeed recently hit a five-year low — but it’s challenging to pinpoint the exact cause.

Gen Z may be the most worried about these AI tools. 62% of college seniors familiar with them told Handshake that they were worried about their job prospects. Some Gen Z engineers have faced fewer entry-level openings and less training when they start their jobs.

AI tools also have their advantages, including productivity gains and unlocked opportunities.

“You can actually make everyone the 10x or proverbial 100x engineer in a really exciting way,” Clark said.

The “100x engineer” — as in, a 10x multiple of an engineer who is already ten times more productive than the average engineer — is a new term among tech circles. Surge CEO Edwin Chen said that AI tools were creating 100x engineers, which helped build the “$1 billion single-person company.”

Clark remained optimistic that AI would replace menial work. He listed some areas of research that, because of AI gains, humans could more meaningfully pursue: oncology, sustainable mining, and space habitation.

“The beauty of AI is that we’re going to be able to reallocate a bunch of human brainpower, firepower, creativity to these most important problems,” he said.

That brainpower can move away from work that is “not the highest marginal use of humanity’s creative and intelligence potential.”

The advent of AI technology has led to a number of surprising applications, such as having human drivers race against AI ones. Here’s who won one such race.