Asked about chatbots in 2022, a colleague or professor may have replied, “Huh?” In 2024, however, AI-assisted chatbots are seemingly everywhere: embedded in social-media feeds, integrated into workflows, and visibly open on many a screen in America’s classrooms. Leading publications rank how chatbots such as ChatGPT, Bing, Claude, Bard, and Gemini answer queries about health, personal finance, cooking, current events, coding, and, of course, writing, signaling the widening remit of possible uses for chatbots in our society. In perhaps an even more telling sign of chatbots going mainstream, U.S. News & World Report, ever hungry for a rank-and-review, released its own guide to the best AI chatbots.
In the years ahead, perhaps some students will pay more attention to AI-chatbot rankings than to college and university rankings.In the years ahead, perhaps some students will pay more attention to AI-chatbot rankings than to U.S. News’s famous college and university rankings. And why wouldn’t they? As the New York Times tech columnist recently wrote, perfecting the practice of prompting chatbots just might “improve many aspects of your life.”
Yet the rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT in the early 2020s has been fraught. Tricky moral and ethical issues surrounding chatbots are nowhere more visible than in higher education. In 2023, for example, faculty and administrators fretted about how chatbots would force course restructuring and a return to strict plagiarism guidelines. Journals such as the Chronicle of Higher Education became forums for professional reflection on the chatbot challenge to teaching—and for forthright student admissions of rampant use. In a community of professors on Reddit, one professor asked, half in jest, if it was time to “make the blue book great again.”
Student uses of chatbots thus sucked up most of the oxygen in conversations on the subject in 2023. Rightfully so, since students were clearly early adopters of tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But limiting the conversation to conventions in undergraduate teaching and learning obscured trickier questions about how evolving chatbots would complicate the work of professors, scholars, educators, and administrators within higher education. Even as a tacit “resistance” to chatbots settled in, it became clear that the challenges they posed to the endeavors of educating, teaching, and researching would be more numerous and trickier than the simple matter of syllabus guidelines for undergraduate students. This is especially so when we consider how the wide range of academic, professional, and administrative functions undertaken by faculty, teachers, and administrators could be altered or enhanced by chatbots—and what it would mean if institutions of higher learning left chatbot practices in a procedural Wild West.
Enter Alexander Sidorkin, the chief AI officer at California State University in Sacramento. Sidorkin’s new book, Embracing Chatbots in Higher Education: The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Teaching, Administration, and Scholarship, foreshadows its argument in its title. In 100 pages and a few dozen digestible, one-to-five-page sections, Sidorkin sets out to demonstrate that AI chatbots can amplify student successes, reduce rising administrative costs, and assist professors and educators in juggling everything from classroom management and grading to literature reviews.
Sidorkin pitches his book as an invitation to “participate in a shared experiment.” Exploring the uses of chatbots in higher education is akin to surveying an “uncharted domain through hands-on experiences rather than controlled studies.” Rather than a step-by-step guide, the book is a “treasure map” pointing to “promising areas for exploration.” The first fifth of Sidorkin’s book, though, reads like a tutorial in the best possible prompts to feed chatbots to optimize their assistance in task areas like brainstorming, research, and genre writing.
Exploring the uses of chatbots in higher education is akin to surveying an “uncharted domain.”Sidorkin sees chatbots as assets for the classroom, academic department, and dean’s office alike. Where some post-ChatGPT commentary has urged colleges to “chatbot-proof” their assignments, Sidorkin advocates for classroom approaches that assimilate chatbots into the curriculum across university subdivisions, in creative writing and computer science alike. Chatbots can assist student writing, perhaps especially for students who are newer to academic writing or in the process of language acquisition. Grading and course management, already widely devolved to graduate or undergraduate TAs, could be further streamlined by chatbots. And chatbots could assist in authoring first drafts of the routine emails and paperwork that characterize university administration, ranging from deluges of emails to dull university policy. Taking all this together, Sidorkin sees a windfall for higher education in the numerous possible uses of AI chatbots. In an era of faculty and administrator burnout and the bottoming out of university budgets, who can blame him for seeing in chatbots a potential boomtime?
Regular reports of AI-chatbot bias, hallucination, and meme-worthy buggy outputs, as well as increased student loneliness, should give any university pause before an all-out integration of the new technology into the classroom. But, as Sidorkin would be quick to note, his is a call for responsible adoption, perhaps akin to the “critical embrace” of chatbots recommend by university task forces or the university-built chatbot tools rolled out at the University of Michigan. A majority of those in higher education may well welcome—indeed, embrace—a responsible adoption of and experimentation with chatbots. But the issue gets trickier when Sidorkin and others turn to the topic of authorship, creativity, and writing.
“Let us be real with ourselves: not all writing calls for originality.” This is the crux of Sidorkin’s argument for the chatbot’s potential in higher education. In the classroom and faculty office alike, AI can transform the process of writing into a “creative partnership,” a prospect that can ease students into intimidating final essays and help faculty get over the perennial problem of writer’s block. Sidorkin’s view is not that students and faculty should copy-and-paste ChatGPT outputs but that writers should recognize that setting out is tough, and we’ve invented a tool that can help save writers time and enhance their productivity. Sidorkin maintains that there are genres and thresholds beyond which “crafting the piece personally becomes more efficient,” but, at the same time, he advises that “the forthcoming AI revolution in text production” challenges academics to rethink citation practices, authorship norms, and perhaps even intellectual property. “One needs to overcome the traditional demarcation between ‘mine’ and ‘not mine,’” he writes. Let the scholars who prefer to handwrite manuscripts and read in print clutch their pearls—the rest of us will get more done more quickly by embracing chatbots.
The promise of AI chatbots may well be “snake oil,” as some technologists themselves have described it.Sidorkin saves questions about the ethical and philosophical dimensions of AI for the fifth and final chapter of his book. Such questions have been “overly emphasized in discussions about AI,” Sidorkin writes. While ethical questions about authorship, copyright, and academic norms are important, Sidorkin argues, such “ethical considerations should not inhibit or slow down the adoption and implementation of AI-driven tools in higher education.” Regulation is advisable, in theory, but Sidorkin wonders if we would “make hasty decisions that inhibit progress due to a lack of experience and knowledge about the new technology.”
My own experiences as a student, teacher, and scholar who came up in the tech-saturated world of the 2010s initially left me inclined to agree with Sidorkin. Adopting and pragmatically deploying AI chatbots is itself a method of instruction by example that can leave students and colleagues with a feeling of empowerment and curiosity about the new technology. Over time, the regular and self-regulated use of AI chatbots will lead to others asking about the technology’s possible uses, many of which are detailed by Sidorkin. One can hope that the introduction of AI chatbots into classrooms and administrative workflows within higher education will create a community of users committed to learning with the new technology while also respecting shared academic norms.
At the same time, I believe Sidorkin’s argument and my intuition to agree with him deserve serious scrutiny. It would be easy for me, a tech-savvy 20-something in graduate school, to lean back and envision an easy future of AI-chatbot-enhanced classrooms and administrative governance. But, on some level, early adopters like Sidorkin and me can sound like parrots of the venture capitalists who publish “Techno-Optimist Manifestos” from their chic headquarters on Sand Hill Road; or the on-again, off-again Open AI CEO Sam Altman, who argues that AI chatbots are our one-way ticket to “the best world ever”; or the SalesForce.org-sponsored article covering the “growing potential for chatbots in higher education” on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website.
Then, too, the promise of AI chatbots as revolutionary technologies may well be “snake oil,” as some technologists themselves have described it. As classic works in the history of technology teach us, new technologies are rarely as revolutionary as their inventors make it seem. The computer itself, which certainly doesn’t lack for influence in higher education, was fairly described by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum as a “fundamentally conservative force” in society. “It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were,” he wrote, “which otherwise might have had to be changed.” Whether AI chatbots reshape higher education is not the question. Whether they reshape it for the better or the worse is what should attract our attention.
Ultimately, whether the latest wave of AI-enhanced chatbots are merely overhyped search engines or truly revolutionary educational tools is a question we can answer only in time, as adoption spreads (or doesn’t) and data about patterns in user behavior become available. Until then, as Sidorkin suggests, the best way to understand how this new technology might reshape higher education is to step in the sandbox and experiment with chatbots yourself.
Jacob Bruggeman is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, where he is the inaugural graduate fellow of the Center for Economy and Society and an associate fellow at the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. He is associate editor of FUSION and editor-at-large at the Cleveland Review of Books. He is a graduate of Miami University and the University of Cambridge, Darwin College.