This year will be the turning point for AI college
THE ATLANTIC
A college senior returning to classes this fall has spent nearly their entire undergraduate career under the shadow—or in the embrace—of generative AI. ChatGPT first launched in November 2022, when that student was a freshman.
As a department chair at Washington University in St. Louis, I witnessed the chaos it unleashed on campus. Students weren’t sure what AI could do, or which uses were appropriate. Faculty were blindsided by how effectively ChatGPT could write papers and do homework. College, it seemed to those of us who teach it, was about to be transformed.
But nobody thought it would happen this quickly. Three years later, the AI transformation is just about complete.
“I cannot think that in this day and age that there is a student who is not using it,” Vasilis Theoharakis, a strategic-marketing professor at the Cranfield School of Management who has done research on AI in the classroom, told me. That’s what I’m seeing in the classes that I teach and hearing from the students at my school: The technology is no longer just a curiosity or a way to cheat; it is a habit, as ubiquitous on campus as eating processed foods or scrolling social media. In the coming fall semester, this new reality will be undeniable. Higher education has been changed forever in the span of a single undergraduate career.
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