By Henry Kelty
ChatGPT’s interface. (Henry Kelty/Radio 1190)
Students and professors in the University of Colorado system will soon receive free access to ChatGPT’s Edu edition, as part of a university effort to integrate generative AI into academia.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently announced a partnership with the university to give each campus in the CU system its own version of ChatGPT Edu. For the first full year, the university itself will directly pay OpenAI for access.
Each campus in the CU system will have its own AI model, but the models will be directly controlled by the university. The individual AI models for the Anschutz, Boulder, Colorado Springs and Denver campuses will act independently of each other – they won’t talk to each other, and they won’t share data with each other. The university has said this is intentional, and is meant to give each campus greater oversight over how ChatGPT Edu is used.
In Boulder specifically, beta testing is already in progress, and the plan is to roll out ChatGPT Edu access to students and professors towards the end of March. More advanced features, such as deep research and application programming interface access for programmers, are expected to be introduced in the fall semester.
ChatGPT Edu is marketed by OpenAI as being “built for universities to reasonably deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.” It’s explicitly billed as an affordable option, with more security and privacy options than the publicly available version of ChatGPT. To that end, CU has made it clear that no data entered into ChatGPT Edu will be used to train the public version of ChatGPT.
There is an argument to be made for CU’s involvement with AI – the university wants to create a centralized and secure environment for AI use, because AI isn’t going away anytime soon. That being said, the Office of Information Technology has clarified that professors will still get to decide whether to allow or prohibit AI use in the classroom – ChatGPT Edu won’t automatically be authorized for coursework.
This partnership reflects a broader trend among universities across the country, as they navigate how to incorporate generative AI into academics and research. For example, Colorado State University has partnered with Microsoft to create CSU-GPT for students and professors, with the system being based on Microsoft Azure’s own AI model.
As generative AI spreads more and more into higher education, universities face a litany of decisions about it – the cost of AI, its privacy protections, and its use in academia. By investing directly into a managed version of ChatGPT, CU says it aims to give students and professors access to a rapidly-spreading technology, while maintaining some degree of oversight. With ChatGPT Edu rolling out next month, we’ll see what its effects are in the real world.