Inside Yale's Quiet Reckoning with AI (thenewjournalatyale.com)

Yale is quietly wrestling with how ChatGPT and similar tools reshape teaching and learning: students are routinely using AI to draft essays, check homework, and brainstorm ideas, sometimes to hide struggles or meet deadlines, while professors and administrators debate what counts as cheating. Interviews with students like “Gwen,” who relied on AI to avoid failure but felt guilty, and “Noor” and “Sea,” who use AI as a tutor or brainstorming partner, show a spectrum of use — from augmentation to substitution — complicated by issues like hallucinations and blurred authorship. Faculty emphasize that many assignments are about learning the process, not just producing a product, and worry students may forfeit essential skills if AI does the thinking for them. Administratively, Yale created a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence in January 2024 and published a July 2024 report calling for leadership in an “AI‑infused future,” backed by roughly $150 million for teaching, training, and computing. Still, the university is avoiding heavy top‑down mandates; new initiatives include course‑specific chatbots trained on materials (e.g., introductory macroeconomics) and an emphasis on helping students and faculty assess when AI aligns with educational goals. The situation underscores two technical and pedagogical imperatives for the AI/ML community: build and communicate AI tools’ limits (e.g., hallucinations), and partner with educators to design assessments and curricula that preserve learning outcomes and academic integrity.