Overview

• Duke University, University of Maryland and California State University have launched campus-wide ChatGPT Edu programs granting students, faculty and staff unlimited premium access.
• Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, is marketing personalized AI accounts for incoming students much like school email assignments.
• ChatGPT Edu includes custom chatbot creation for faculty, a memory feature that retains prior interactions and privacy safeguards that prevent using campus inputs to train the model.
• Educators and privacy experts caution that AI chatbots can hallucinate false information, enable surveillance and diminish critical thinking and social engagement.
• Competing tech firms such as Google and Elon Musk’s xAI are offering free AI services to students as part of an escalating race for university adoption.