We are back in Inside Higher Ed arguing that generative AI is being coded as political. We argue that treating AI as another front in the culture war is a mistake. Read it here.

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. 

Zach and I were published in Inside Higher Education writing “Our argument is that the integration of AI technology into existing platforms has rendered these frameworks obsolete.” Read the article.

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.

I was on the Morning Show - Newstalk with Scott Michaels and Mike Baca taking about the impact of ChatGPT on higher education and how professors and administrators are approaching generative AI more broadly. Have a listen on the page.

Zach and I were interviewed by Muna Sadek from KRCR Chanel 7 in Chico about ChatGPT and its impacts on higher education.

Professors Nik Janos and Zach Justus held a ChatGPT workshop for students Friday. They say their goal is to hear insights from students on how the technology has been changing their approach to education. They one of the most common questions they are asked is whether use of the website makes a student guilty of cheating.

When Zach and I talk to colleagues about ChatGPT and other generative AIs, the conversation always includes the topic of plagiarism and cheating. For many different reasons students cheat and for many different reasons instructors and students are concerned about cheating and plagiarism. This post isn’t about the politics and best practices of academic integrity. Rather it is a cautious warning about the quest to find a technical fix to cheating with AI. As soon as ChatGPT was released in the fall of 2022, individuals and companies have been building AI detection tools. These tools began to roll out in 2023. This is the arms race that we theorized in our first post in February 2022.