Why inviting AI into the room where syllabi are made is the easy part; and where the harder part begins. A Jataka parrot, a Board of Studies, and the difference between a voice that recites and an authority that must answer for the choice.
Why inviting AI into the room where syllabi are made is the easy part; and where the harder part begins
There is a Jataka tale about a king who kept a wise parrot. The bird had travelled widely and could name the failings of every minister at court. The king consulted it on everything until the parrot, swollen with importance, suggested it might sit upon the throne while the king attended to lesser matters. The king who knew the difference between a clever voice and a crowned head replied: you may speak from the perch; you may not speak from the throne.
I read that story alongside a careful institutional note now circulating among Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in India. It proposes that every Board of Studies — the committee that decides what a degree shall actually contain — begin making structured use of an AI tool. Not as a member or voter, but as an 'AI Special Invitee'; a guest with a perch and emphatically no throne. The proposal is quietly sensible. It is also easier to write than to honour.
The easy part
The Board of Studies is one of those bodies the public never sees and the academic never forgets. It is where a syllabus is benchmarked, outdated content pruned, and someone finally asks whether the way students are examined bears any relation to what they were meant to learn. Get it wrong, and a cohort of graduates will carry the error into the workforce for decades. The note would let AI assist in benchmarking a draft curriculum against comparable programmes, flagging gaps, and checking that outcomes align with assessment. It is scrupulous about the perch: the tool does not vote, is not counted toward quorum, and holds no authority. The machine may speak, not decide. As principle, it is right. The trouble is that such principles are strongest on paper and weakest in the third hour of a meeting when a tired committee is handed a fluent, confident-looking summary.
As a tool cannot present a slide, each Board must designate a faculty member as the 'Operator' who runs the queries and represents the output faithfully. Readers will recognise this as the minister who gathers counsel and carries it to the one who must choose. The genius of Tenali Rama and Birbal was never that they ruled but that they brought the right information to the one who did. Accountability, the note insists, rests with the Operator and the Board, never with the tool. No one may hide behind the parrot.
Yet, notice what the Operator must be: both the enthusiast who runs the tool and the sceptic who catches its errors. Those are two varying temperaments, asked of one tired colleague, often the convener already minuting the meeting. The mantri who is also taking dictation is not in a strong position to interrupt the king.
The whole framework leans on four words: outputs must be verified. Verification is exactly what institutional life is worst at sustaining. Honest checking means pulling the syllabi the tool claims to have compared and confirming that a named 'recent development' is real, not a plausible invention: hours of work that the tool was meant to save. The danger is not that AI seizes the throne. It is that its smooth output is waved through because checking is dull and it usually looks right. Committees are not seduced by accuracy; they are seduced by fluency.
The parrot was dangerous not when it was wrong but when it was charming. So, safeguards must be designed, not assumed: the colleague who runs the tool should not be the one who certifies it and no AI-generated fact should enter the minutes without a checked source.
The real gap
The knowledge gap is not the distance between what the machine knows and what we know. It is between information and judgment, between the voice that recites and the authority that chooses and is answerable for the choice. India's universities are about to test whether they can keep that gap honest; not in the founding document, which is admirable, but on the dull afternoons when no one is watching the perch.
Views are personal
The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of RV University, Karnataka.
First published in The Hindu as part of THE KNOWLEDGE GAP column, 13 July 2026.