ChatGPT Edu at CSU – LAist
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Why it matters: The budget gap has led to a tuition hike, as well as spending cuts and fewer course offerings. Critics feel that the money spent on the chatbot should have been used to ameliorate these issues.
What faculty say: Some educators have embraced the system’s pivot to AI. Others have denounced the move, worried about the technology’s potential impact on their jobs. Faculty also have expressed concern about AI’s toll on the environment; mounting surveillance; and language learning models with built-in racial and gender biases.
What school leaders say: Leslie Kennedy, assistant vice chancellor of academic technology services, and chief information officer Ed Clark, who oversees IT strategy across the CSU, said they want to prepare students for the future. They underscored that generative AI already has transformed higher ed, from lecture halls to post-graduation job prospects.
Go deeper: Inside Cal State’s big $17 million bet on ChatGPT for all
Starting this year, all California State University students and faculty will have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, a bespoke version of one of the world’s leading chatbots.
Some educators have welcomed the university system’s pivot to artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, the system put out a call for proposals, asking faculty to come up with strategies to integrate AI literacy into the curricula. By May, the CSU received more than 400 proposals. Ultimately, 63 of them were awarded up to $60,000 in grants.
But the system’s investment in AI has not been universally embraced. The California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 CSU professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches, denounced the move over concerns about faculty job security. Faculty also expressed concern about AI’s toll on the environment; mounting surveillance; language learning models with built-in racial and gender biases; and other related issues.
Faculty also have criticized the CSU for spending nearly $17 million on ChatGPT Edu licenses, even as it faces a $2.3 billion budget gap that has spurred spending cuts and fewer course offerings.
To get a better sense of why the university system invested this way, despite the financial circumstances, LAist spoke with:
Because of wide-ranging interest in this initiative, LAist offers this transcript of our conversation, to provide more details about how the university system is approaching an issue that has a major potential impact.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
LAist: What compelled the system to get ChatGPT Edu?
Clark: There are several things that came together to lead us to our AI strategy. One of the most important things we were seeing in the market is that these tools were really expensive. So, essentially, only people that could afford to have these tools had access to them.
[The upgraded version of] Chat GPT, for example, was $20 a month per person. And there were members of our community [who] were buying those subscriptions for themselves, but there were many members of our community [who] couldn’t afford that.
We were [also] seeing that some universities in our own system were starting to negotiate deals with these vendors, but then others couldn’t afford to do that. So, we’re thinking: “We’re not going to create a digital divide within our own system. We’re going to make sure that everybody has access to these tools.”
And we buttress that with: We believe that these tools are going to become fundamental, just like the internet is today — every industry, every academic field, every discipline is going to be using these tools. So, we need our students, our community members, to engage with them now. We’re not going to wait until we’re far behind everybody else … to give this access.
And on the workforce side, in terms of student preparation, we already know that employers are expecting students to graduate with [AI] skills. … We want our students to be prepared for the workforce or graduate school or whatever they’re going to do when they leave the CSU.
Kennedy: We’re emphasizing AI literacy for the students and also for our faculty.
There’s been a lot of reporting on computer science majors facing a shrinking job market. Did these kinds of changes factor into your decision-making?
Clark: Some of these firms are saying, “Hey, I can get an AI to do what this entry-level programmer was doing,” right? That’s kind of the thinking. [For example, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia] said, “Hey, we’re going all AI.” They just got rid of all of their teams. … Now, they’ve hired all their workers back because it turns out, artificial intelligence [can have] a lot of errors.
In fact, that’s one of the criticisms of it, right? Even if you have, let’s say, 80% accuracy, there are a lot of places where 80% accuracy is not good enough, like when it comes to safety or news and those kinds of things.
The most effective uses of these tools I’m seeing are, for example, in coding: Yes, [AI will] generate code, and then someone [who] knows how to code can fix the parts that aren’t working correctly or just as importantly ensure that it’s secure. … Technology always displaces, but then it’s followed up with new ways of doing things, usually coming up with new opportunities, as well. And I really believe that AI is going to be one of these that will follow the same pattern, albeit in a more accelerated fashion.
Kennedy: Yes, there are some disruptions, but there is also the need to actually have people who are very knowledgeable in AI because it’s not the answer for everything.
Clark: [Earlier this month,] I was at Gov. Newsom’s AI press conference in San Francisco, and I rode with a taxi driver from the airport. And he was saying: “You know, there’s so many Waymos (self-driving cars). I paid off this cab, it’s really important to me, but I’m ready to go to something else. I’m ready. Someone just needs to tell me where we are going to go next.” And I think that’s the mission that our higher education institutions have. We’re going to help you reskill. We understand this displacement is happening, which is why we must lean in, understanding how these technologies are going to change our society and where we’re going to go next. We can’t just leave people displaced — that’s core to the CSU mission.
Some CSU faculty have expressed concerns about privacy. What have you done to safeguard the data of students and educators?
Clark: One of our founding principles when we signed the contract [was]: “We’re not going to allow this data to get outside of the CSU sphere.” It’s all protected. The data can’t be accessed by any third parties; it can’t be used to train their new models; and so on and so forth. That’s part of our contract. And, in fact, when we looked at our policies — you know, we have everything from our privacy policies to our acceptable use policies — at first, we were thinking, “Well, do we need to change anything for AI?” And it turns out, no, it’s a new technology, but it fits right within our standard set of policies. We’re going to continue protecting your privacy, your data. We’re going to make sure that you don’t use these tools to commit crimes, those kinds of things. We have the same rules around the internet.
Kennedy: On our website, you can see what we’ve written there in regards to those policies, that privacy aspect of it. You’ll also see all of the policies that govern any technology used in the system.
We filed public records requests to compare the CSU’s ChatGPT expense with other public universities in the U.S. So far, it appears that the CSU has gotten the best deal, in terms of cost per user. What can you share about those negotiations?
Clark: We have the most diverse university system in the United States. Close to half of our students are first gen, [a] very high percentage of [them are] Pell Grant recipients. And so, one of the things that I think resonated with the partners we were negotiating with is: “You are adding to the digital divide. We need to have access to these tools. Our students specifically need to access these tools because we represent one out of every 20 graduates in the United States. And, also, one out of 10 employees in the state of California is a CSU graduate. What that means is if you leave our community behind, then you’ve left a huge portion of the United States behind.” And so, I think that allowed us to negotiate an unprecedented deal for these tools.
And, because we put the students first, even at a time of budget cuts, we said: “Look, we have to do this for our community, for our students. We’re going to make sure that they’re ready for this emerging economy.” And so, I think there’s high confidence that we are doing the right thing, and I don’t see any reason why we would pull back from that strategy.
Our chancellor’s strategic plan will be launched next month, and it’s all about student success and student outcomes. That’s how we gauge what we’re going to do and what we’re going to invest in.
The other thing we noted with these AI tools is that the environment is changing so rapidly. When we signed the [18-month agreement], we knew things could change so rapidly that maybe something else would emerge. And we said: “Well, maybe this is better now.” But we did want to have that flexibility, but we are also very, very happy with our partnership with OpenAI and the ChatGPT rollout at this moment.
Some universities started with just a few hundred ChatGPT licenses, as opposed to access for all students and faculty. Why did the CSU decide to make ChatGPT Edu accessible systemwide?
Clark: As I mentioned, we were seeing certain universities that had more resources saying: “We’re going to go sign a deal with X vendor or Y vendor.” That was already happening in the CSU, and it already happened in other schools. So, for us at the system office, that’s not OK because then some campuses will be ahead. And, then, because you’re a faculty member or a student at the wrong campus, you don’t have access. That wasn’t going to be something that works for us. So, we wanted to make sure everybody had access.
San Diego State had already started rolling out their own AI tools before we launched our strategy, for example.
Kennedy: Yeah. It was an example of inclusivity. We wanted to make sure everybody was included.
How will the CSU determine whether this investment returned on its promise?
Clark: We were asked that very question from our board of trustees.
We’ve engaged with a firm that’s developing a set of metrics, talking to our community members, faculty members, students — you name the stakeholder group, they’re engaging with them to say: “How are we going to measure everything?” And it covers everything from awareness and adoption, to how [ChatGPT Edu is] being used in the classroom and the learning outcomes, to administrative efficiency and productivity. Even things like environmental impact, we want to measure that too.
What kind of training are you providing for students and faculty?
Kennedy: If you look on our GenAI site, we’ve got a section on training. And we’re offering, for everyone in the system, free training, micro credentials. The focus is: what is AI, how to use it, prompting examples, and then also ethical and responsible use. … They’ve all been developed within the system. San Diego State developed two of them. Fresno State developed another one. Monterey Bay also developed one of them and then shared it with the system. My team manages all that and distributes it. And then, if [students] complete the exercises, they can actually earn a badge that they can share on their social media, which we think is really important for the students, for future job searches, just to give them an edge in that regard. … We’ve got training for students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
What would you say to people who believe the CSU should not have spent nearly $17 million dollars on ChatGPT during a budget crisis — and to people who have misgivings about AI itself?
Kennedy: We still have a half a million students, even though we’re being challenged with funding in general. And we still want to prepare them for the future. So, we can’t stop innovation. We wanted to make sure that we continue to support our students in this changing environment as much as possible, and that’s why we moved ahead.
[AI is] going to transform everything we do in our lives. … And it’s really about learning how to use it effectively and efficiently and responsibly.
It can be intimidating for many people, myself included. [When I first heard of AI,] I thought: “Oh, my gosh, I have to think differently,” because I teach part-time at Long Beach State.
And so, we’re funding quite a few faculty development programs that we’re hoping to see grow across the system, and many of the campuses are facilitating those, as well, to understand the concepts better and then to think through what kind of transformational activities are going to potentially have to happen in their courses to accommodate for these changes.
You know, I’ve been teaching since the ’90s. So, when the internet came on, we were all up in arms. I was teaching writing courses when students were copying and pasting into the[ir] papers. We had to go through that whole academic-integrity aspect of it. … And then we had Wikipedia come on a few years later, and that upset the apple cart because everybody was using Wikipedia as a reference, and there was a lot of push back on that. But now that’s stabilized.
And so, we’re in that next phase of innovation with [AI]. We’re in that beginning phase where we’re trying to get a grasp of what it’s providing us and how it’s affecting how we work. … That’s what we did not want to ignore.
Clark: To any critic [who’s] worried about the negative impacts of AI on our society, we want you to participate. Join us. If you don’t join us, you can’t help us shape the future, right? … It’s like complaining about an election that you didn’t vote in. So, get in there, make your vote heard so that we can shape it to support our mission and our goals.
LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network.
