College students now have free access to premium AI through Google Gemini, ChatGPT Plus, and xAI's Super Grok and we are not talking about it.

The messaging students receive about generative AI is maddening in its contradictions. Companies are now offering them free access to premium GenAI tools, while many faculty are rushing to ban its usage, and industry is signaling that they expect college graduates to be fully AI literate. How would you feel in this landscape? Faculty are telling students they must show their knowledge and skills without tools like ChatGPT, while their future employers are screaming for them to arrive prepared to use this technology in the name of efficiency, while tech developers offer them increasing access to more GenAI features than anyone can keep up with.

Students have to navigate these opposing messages and are largely left on their own to develop their understanding of GenAI as a practical tool and establish an ethical understanding of using or not using it. How does that work when each day students are confronted by faculty who give them the green light to use AI, while others say doing so will lead them to be taken up on charges and fail a class, while still others don’t say anything at all regarding generative AI?

🚨 As Burnett astutely observes in his recent New Yorker piece:

"[E]veryone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular."