Come for the research assistant, stay for the ego boost? Recently, ChatGPT turned into a sycophant . The general vibe on social media was that some trust was broken and new questions were raises. Should AIs have personality, and if so can they develop personality disorders? What are the implications for using these tools in academia?

There is a truth about the prolific output of professors at research universities, called R1 schools, that is unclear to those on the outside. Professors at these universities routinely publish books and countless journal articles, deliver class lectures to hundreds of students, and grade student work all by leveraging the labor of graduate students in their role as Research Assistants (RAs) and Teaching Assistants (TA). For professors like me who teach at schools where RAs and TAs are rare, generative AI can level the playing field and make our work easier, maybe even better. This post is about my experience leveraging these tools in similar ways as my R1 professors. I also want to talk about the reluctance of faculty to admit to using these tools in their professional work. 

Billing it as an historical first, the Office of the Chancellor of the California State University system announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to every student, staff, and professor at the 23 campuses. This new partnership is poised to alter the course of this disruption in ways foreseen but opening up a slew of new issues and opportunities. In this post, we will give an overview of this partnership, what it changes and what it does not, and provide some initial thoughts on some likely implications. 

It’s summer break for faculty and we’ll have less posts until we’re back in late August. Enjoy the sun or winter if you’re in the far southern hemisphere. NOTE: picture is exactly what we look like.

Having been thinking about, writing, and speaking publicly about generative AI for one year, we wanted to look back at our first post called “Responses to ChatGPT”, which we published on January 26, 2023. What did we get right? What do we know now that we didn’t know then? And what might the next year of AI in higher education look like?

What did we get right? We’re both humble people but in this case we’ll say “nailed it.”

November 17, the Friday before Thanksgiving, a shock came out of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The board of directors had fired Sam Altman CEO and public face of the company. What? Jaw drop for sure. This post is not about the craptastic mismanagement of the company that produces ChatGPT and DALL-E, which have basically become the Kleanex of generative AI products. Rather I take this whole episode as a warning, as a disruption within a disruption.