Stop sending us emails about your new AI thing

Life at Princeton comes with a few built-in annoyances. Last year, a fire in Wendell Hall sent Whitman residents running outside to the tune of blaring alarms. Somehow, the year is 2026 and some poor souls still live in the Forbes Annex. Still, these inconveniences seem insignificant next to a new contender for Princeton’s Most Annoying Thing: excessive emails about AI events.

There are many legitimate reasons to discuss AI. Writing on X, Evan Hubinger — a safety engineer at Anthropic — expressed his own fears: a greater than 10 percent chance that AI will “kill all humans” in the next decade. Certainly, the potential extinction of the human race is grounds for expressing some concern. But at Princeton, recent public discussions of AI have become far too frequent, representing a disturbing shift in our extracurricular culture away from its original, human purposes — and towards machines.

It would be one thing if I were referring to Princeton networks on LinkedIn, where it seems that everyone you know has just launched their own AI startup. No, the problem hits closer to home: AI events are taking over HoagieMail. 

For the uninitiated, HoagieMail is Princeton’s University-wide email service. Recently, however, the forum has presented me with a deluge of invitations to join all manner of AI functions: labs, reading groups, research groups, a research journal, hackathons, Tiger Treks, startup incubators — and even a few incubated startups.

The problem seems innocuous; Hoagie is generally a pretty eclectic collection of campus stuff. Indeed, last year I received a grand total of six emails beckoning me to attend Princeton Students for Reproductive Justice’s talk on the female orgasm (“FIRST 25 PEOPLE GET A FREE ‘I <3 the Female Orgasm’ SHIRT!”).

But here’s where I’m concerned: The email cacophony suggests that AI is becoming a constant thought at Princeton. AI appears in social, extracurricular spaces — even where it isn’t warranted. To give one jarring example, I’ve received emails advertising AI-related events from the Effective Altruism Club and Students for Prison Education, Abolition, and Reform (SPEAR). 

Now, AI certainly can be a helpful tool in both the nonprofit and advocacy worlds. But, when artificial intelligence became a central point for even these clubs’ promotional materials, it is reflective of more than a shift in tools. AI is so prevalent in campus organizations that its inclusion has become a given. 

When AI becomes an advertised point across the range of Princeton’s extracurriculars, an essential campus forum for expressing humanity has been changed. According to Rights, Rules, Responsibilities — the University’s guide for student conduct — Princeton students “bear substantial responsibility for determining and applying rules of social conduct.” In other words, Princeton’s clubs are a space for students’ social self-expression. Clubs are not graded at Princeton — their success is quantified by their own metrics. But, when a tool that quantifies everything becomes an incentive for joining our clubs, student leadership and connection isn’t at the hub of our social conduct: The machines are.

The funny thing is, the website for Princeton’s Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies (ODUS) lists just two undergraduate clubs devoted exclusively to AI: Princeton AI Alignment and AI at Princeton. Unless ODUS has vastly underreported the number of student organizations devoted to AI, the torrent of emails is the product of a different phenomenon: an abundance of AI-related events from clubs that are not themselves dedicated to AI. Progress and optimization in the name of extracurriculars are certainly admirable, but surely we should maintain the humanity in our clubs. The tool has co-opted Princeton’s extracurricular sphere — and Princetonians’ inboxes therein. Tell us about your Tacoria dinner events; Princeton doesn’t need more AI demos.

It’s one thing to use AI for necessary work; letting the tool dominate our extracurricular spaces is an entirely different mistake — one with deep social ramifications. Spending more time discussing machines instead of embracing moments we have to connect with our classmates is an indicator of serious pervasion.

If you are one of those budding Princeton mathematicians who will solve a Millennium Problem or two with help from an LLM, by all means use AI for your quantitative fiddling and such. But when we let the machines dominate our social spaces, we’ve gone too far.

There are definitely tiers to the spam Princetonians receive. Somehow, I find myself preferring the orgasm emails over the sinister proliferation of AI: at least the orgasmists promised t-shirts.

Josh Stiefel is cleaning up his inbox. He is an assistant Opinion Editor from Teaneck, NJ whom you can reach at js9365@princeton.edu.