I am writing this month’s column from the US, specifically Pennsylvania, where I’ve been visiting a friend who is an academic at a major college in the state. With one tech journalist at the table (me) and one professor (him), the conversation quickly turned to generative AI and how it’s influencing and shifting academia, something my friend is grappling with right now.

He told me how he and his colleagues are rewriting assignments to try to discourage students from merely turning in Chat- GPT’s take on a topic, with strategies like “apply X theory to Y problem”, something the chatbot still struggles with. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Second language English speakers, for example, find great utility in having ChatGPT “correct” their work, so their language skills are not a hinderance to demonstrating command of the concepts. It’s easy to see how that might go awry, blurring the line between editing and writing.