Times Higher Education (THE) have announced that they will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to process the data submitted for their Impact rankings, now transformed into the Sustainability Impact Ratings. I suspect that will be followed by the use of AI in all sectors of the ranking business.
It would be naive to think that universities plugged into the THE ratings network will not use AI to produce the data required by THE. Media reports and the responses of university bureaucrats will likely be written with the help of AI. Ranking and other university-related activities will consist of massive amounts of discourse generated, transmitted, evaluated, and curated by a succession of Large Language Models (LLMs), without ever entering into a human mind, except possibly at the very end of the production chain.
Given the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate, that is to produce plausible-sounding answers that are wrong or nonsensical, this is unnerving. The future will be a world in which acquiescence in fictional or near-fictional narratives is an essential condition for employment.
Here is an example of what looks like an entirely AI-generated world university ranking. There is no information about data collection procedures, sources, advisory committee, or auditing, nothing to suggest that there is any relationship to reality.
On the other hand, the results do seem quite sensible: ETH Zurich first for research, Peking University for Reputation, University of California San Diego for employment. That is a bit more convincing than the THE world rankings, which in 2023 had Arak University of Medical Sciences first for citations, Istanbul Technical University for Industry Income, and Macau University of Science and Technology for international outlook.
So far, this ranking does not seem to be making any impact, but it seems there will be a new edition in September. Keep watching.