When Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia recalls the arrival of her sister’s Hogwarts letter, she remembers her parents’ response and her own reaction: “‘We have a witch in the family. Isn’t it wonderful?’ I was the only one to see her for what she was. A freak!” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). This dichotomy of responses in the Evans household is being repeated as academics explore the implications of easily accessible artificial intelligence software. It is tough to keep up with the explosion of articles that are appearing on a seemingly daily basis about the latest iteration of OpenAI’s freely available ChatGPT, although I am grateful that Peter Paccone is trying to do just that.
My goal is not to add to or replicate that raft of documents but rather to try to think through the implications of the ChatGPT explosion for academic administrators concerned with supporting faculty and undergraduate students as they confront the opportunities and challenges the technology brings with it. While it will probably be a while until we can fully imagine the impact this technology will have on our colleges and universities, here are some initial frameworks and contexts in which we would do well to try to situate our faculty’s engagement with technologies like ChatGPT.
