Having worked for decades in conservation nonprofits, Beth Pratt, who lives high in the Sierra Foothills in Midpines, California, understands how climate change is putting her home at ever greater risk. Her community is experiencing what she calls “climate whiplash”: forest fires, record heat, massive snow dumps, mudslides, rockslides, and even a tornado.

When Pratt, now 54, bought her 1,400-square-foot house in 1999, she thought the setting was ideal: on a big lot near Yosemite National Park. As recently as a decade ago, she told me by Zoom one recent morning, she didn’t particularly worry about wildfires—a problem that now plagues her area with disturbing frequency. Pratt said she has been forced to evacuate three times.

Making her best effort at “coexisting with fire,” as she put it, Pratt had metal roofing installed atop her house. To clear combustible material from around its perimeter, she learned how to cut trees with a chainsaw and to carefully incinerate heaps of wood debris. “I finally got comfortable doing my own burn pile, which took me a while,” she said. “I mean, lighting a fire can be a little scary, right?” Pratt has gone to enormous lengths to protect her house. She has a 2,500-gallon well tank with a firehose hookup, and added new metal decks to replace her wood ones. Because of these efforts, she reports, she’s passed the “defensible space” inspections recommended by the state fire department. “This home, which is my home, I would work six jobs to keep,” she said.

[Read: When your yard can kill you]

To Allstate, Pratt’s longtime home insurer, her resolve appears to be irrelevant. The company dropped her as a customer in July, she says. Given her professional expertise in environmental matters—Pratt is the California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation—she figured that growing climate risks might mean higher bills for insurance, but she wasn’t prepared to lose her coverage entirely. “I have an MBA. I’m not anti-business,” she told me. “Just raise my rates.” (Citing privacy concerns, Allstate declined to comment on her case.)

As climate-related disasters grow in frequency and intensity, major home insurers in some locations are concluding that no premium—or at least no premium that customers are willing to pay and state regulators are likely to permit—will cover the potential losses. Earlier this year, Allstate and California’s largest insurer, State Farm, announced that they would hold off on writing new policies for homes in the state. From 2019 to 2022, payouts to homeowners there more than doubled, but premium revenue from customers increased by only a third, according to industry data reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Rising home-insurance rates reflect a lot of factors: real-estate costs, building-supply prices, the whims of global financial markets, and, yes, corporate bean counters’ desire to maximize profits. But more and more, homeowners are also paying for the damage that climate change will cause to their property—and they should be paying. If the continuing risk of fires, hurricanes, and other weather-related disasters isn’t enough to make Americans think carefully about how and where to build a home, perhaps the rising cost of insurance might concentrate their mind. Yet policies at all levels of government suppress the signal that insurers are sending. That’s certainly true in deep-blue California. Even as prominent politicians there take pride in acknowledging climate risks, the state’s insurance-regulation system is built to discourage premium hikes.

In many ways, that bias is justifiable, and not only in California. Many people live in vulnerable areas partly as a result of past racial or economic discrimination; they buy homes in flood-prone areas because more privileged people own all the higher ground. A lot of Americans are underinsured because of genuine hardship, and suffer more than their wealthier counterparts do from uncompensated losses. But lower-income people also suffer disproportionately if coverage isn’t available at all.

In California, insurance companies are prohibited from using statistical modeling to assess future fire risks when setting rates; premium increases must be based on insurers’ loss history, not on the growing likelihood of serious fires. The state’s pro-consumer rules can’t hold off reality forever. After Allstate dropped her, Pratt patched together coverage from other private insurers and from the FAIR Plan, California’s public insurer of last resort. But she said she’s now paying twice as much as in the past for coverage that’s less comprehensive.

Certain regions of the country have long been prone to tornadoes, hailstorms, hurricanes, or other weather-related disasters, but this summer the dire signs of a climate crisis seem to have multiplied. July was the hottest month on record. A rare hurricane swept into Southern California. Wildfires tore through a historic town on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Fires in Canada brought dangerous levels of smoke to much of the northeastern United States. “Mother Nature is busting through the front door of American families,” Roy Wright told me recently. Now the CEO of the Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group funded by insurers, Wright previously served in senior roles at FEMA during the Obama and Trump administrations and at one point ran the federal government’s flood-insurance program. Every state has some sort of a public insurance system, like California’s FAIR Plan, for homeowners who can’t get coverage on the private market. These systems of last resort, however, are becoming insurers of first resort. After Hurricane Ian led to devastating losses in Florida last year, smaller insurance companies went bankrupt trying to satisfy claims. And over the past two years, the state’s insurance system, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, has doubled its number of policyholders. It now covers about 13 percent of the homeowner’s-insurance market in the entire state. Is this sustainable?

Professionals in my field, disaster preparedness, have one thing in common with insurers’ risk-assessment experts: We both spend a lot of time telling people things they don’t want to hear. (I should note here that, in promoting my book The Devil Never Sleeps in recent months, I gave paid speeches at two small insurance-industry events.) The right’s preferred form of denial is to brush off the importance of climate change. When Donald Trump chided his Republican rival Ron DeSantis in July to “get home and take care of insurance,” the former president presumably wasn’t telling the Florida governor to rethink the low-lying state’s development rules and emergency-preparedness policies in light of global warming.

[Read: How 12 readers prepare for natural disasters]

In the past, insurers have generally been able to diversify their own portfolios to balance different risks; historically, insurers that do business across the country could afford a bad year in one or two states. But the math becomes more challenging as disasters proliferate. The cost of reinsurance—essentially, coverage that insurers take out to protect themselves against big losses—has shot upward, in large part because of growing climate risks.

Insurers are regulated by states—in many cases by elected officials whose job is to make sure the companies aren’t overcharging ratepayers, not to encourage long-term climate adaptation. Home insurance is expensive in Oklahoma, for example, in large part because of high winds and hail big enough to destroy roofs—and because of building rules that don’t adequately take that threat into account. In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, which subjected certain auto- and property-insurance rate hikes to state review. Consumer advocates argue that the insurance industry makes billions of dollars in profits in the state, and they have recently accused Allstate and State Farm of bullying California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara into going along with excessive rate increases. (In a statement, Allstate told me that it has “paused” new homeowner-insurance policies because the “ability to adjust prices quickly in California is not an option due to Proposition 103.”) Another possibility, though, is that climate-related risks are becoming apparent faster than the state’s regulatory system can take them into account—lulling the public into complacency about the climate crisis. “Risk has a price, and by not acknowledging that price, homeowners can’t understand that risk,” Erwann Michel-Kerjan, a McKinsey partner who focuses on insurance matters and co-wrote the book At War With the Weather, told me.

The upshot of American disaster-relief policy as a whole has been to extend the status quo, no matter what. Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University urban-planning professor who studies climate change and the built environment, expresses some frustration with consumer advocates who view the rising cost of coverage as a “power play” by the industry. “It often is,” he told me. “But what [advocates] don’t acknowledge is the culpability of a lot of different actors—local governments that do not strengthen land and zoning use, state legislators who pass laws making it harder to place obligations on homeowners, and a federal government that writes big, unconditional checks. So there is a lot of blame to go around.”

Some of that blame includes the 1988 Stafford Act, the current mechanism by which a president can declare an emergency, whose incentive structures for disaster relief can work against the very climate resiliency needed to protect homeowners. It was adopted at a time when disasters that required federal assistance were considered random flukes—the kind of event that could stretch a state’s ability to respond but wasn’t likely to recur. The relief generally discourages using the money to fundamentally alter how individuals behave, let alone how local and state governments function. In addition, after the largest disasters, Congress will typically approve multibillion-dollar relief funds, as it recently did after Hurricane Ian in Florida. That money is helpful to people in need, but it does far too little to encourage communities to defend themselves against future losses. Some lawmakers criticize these aid packages—but promptly change their mind when disaster strikes their own constituents, as Senator Rand Paul, an opponent of hurricane-relief bills, did when tornadoes devastated parts of Kentucky.

Protecting people in harm’s way is, I would argue, an essential part of the government’s job. But public officials are also shirking their responsibility to not leave communities vulnerable again and again. Keenan recognizes that people are tied to their neighborhoods, but the present incentive structure puts its inhabitants at risk: “I understand people love their homes but we should be telling them to love their kids who are at risk of climate disasters.”

Insurers are probably not thinking about the safety of a homeowner’s children when they abandon coverage or increase rates because of climate catastrophes. Their risk calculation is purely transactional; issues around equity and fairness are not of primary import to them. But their recent assessments are the symptom of a problem, not the cause, and we should all heed their warning: Living in paradise, or most anywhere else, has a cost. Climate change is real, and we need to pay.

No question is more dreadfully pretentious than “What is art?” except possibly “Can you come see my one-person show?” Yet I’ve accepted that at some point in the course of a life, both will need to be answered. Because I’m a writer facing the advent of ChatGPT, the time for the first question is now.

Most people (including some writers themselves) forget that creative writing is an art form. I suspect that this is because, unlike music or painting or sculpture or dance—for which rare natural aptitude straight away separates practitioners from appreciators—writing is something that everyone does and that many people believe they do well.

I have been at parties with friends who are dancers, comedians, visual artists, and musicians, and I have never witnessed anyone say to them, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Yet I can scarcely meet a stranger without hearing about how they have “always wanted to write a novel.” Their novel is unwritten, they seem to believe, not for lack of talent or honed skill, but simply for lack of time. But just as most people can’t dance on pointe, most people can’t write a novel. They forget that writing is art.

[Read: The college essay is dead]

Art plumbs the depths of human experience and distills the emotions found there. That’s hard work, which inherently—and perhaps conveniently for me—can be done only by a human. This doesn’t mean that all art humans make is effective or good, nor does it mean that a computer cannot generate content that might entertain or inform. A computer alone can’t make art. But it can, I expect, make “good writing.”

The rise of ChatGPT forces us to think about this distinction between art and good writing—or “craft,” as we’re taught to call it. For most writers, the path to publishing involves writing-preparatory programs—workshops and private writing classes and M.F.A. programs—that are structured around the mastery of writing as a craft. But if we want human writing to survive as an art (and as a profession), these programs need to reassess their priorities because they are facing an existential crisis.

I was 41 when I took my first intensive writing course during a week-long summer workshop. Its structure, I’d come to learn, was largely based on the same pedagogical model as most M.F.A. programs: an instructor-led workshop, where we would evaluate one another’s stories, supplemented by craft talks. I found my writing so improved by the course that I wanted more. By the following year, I was enrolled in a masters-of-fine-arts program.

I loved graduate school. I had instructors who changed how I thought about writing and my art and who I could be as an artist. But I found myself occasionally frustrated, and one particular incident from my last semester sticks in my mind.

It was the pandemic, and we were workshopping a classmate’s story that, we all agreed, wasn’t “working.” On the Zoom, we danced around the reason, but privately, in a smaller chat, some of us were more frank: The author was evading the real reason their character seemed so distressed. In other words, the story was a well-written pile of emotional bullshit.

Encountering this in a story feels the same as hearing a well-phrased-but-feeble excuse in real life: You might accept it, but you’re not buying it. Yet the professor’s advice was all about cleaning up the point of view and adding more action. In short, mechanical fixes for an emotional problem.

Maybe the endless Zooming had finally gotten to me, or maybe it was the impatience that has struck me post-40, but suddenly I unmuted and blurted out: “I’m sorry, is this a masters in fine arts or a masters in fine mechanics? The sentences could be perfect, but it won’t fix the fact that the story isn’t being honest.”

To which my professor replied, “What’s wrong with being a good mechanic?”

The answer, of course, is nothing. Writing beautiful, clear sentences that string together into gorgeous paragraphs that assemble into elegantly constructed narratives requires discipline and discernment and technical understanding. My work as a novelist has absolutely benefited from the improvement of my technical skills. But literary art is not about the mechanics of sentences. It’s about how those sentences support emotional honesty.

[Jonathan Malesic: What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students]

You can dissect great writing without ever analyzing or even discussing the emotions involved or evoked, and walk away with some craft strategies to deploy in your own work. But a machine can do that too. It can read—it has read—the same great writers I have read. It can (and is beginning to) learn all of the clever lessons of craft. It will almost certainly become capable of producing what many M.F.A. classes would consider “good writing.”

But if that’s the case, maybe that “good writing” isn’t so good after all. If this new technology makes such writing ubiquitous, that writing may as well be obsolete.

If we want to push the art of writing out of a computer’s reach, the questions posed in writing workshops should go past “How could this piece work better?” to “How could this piece be more honest? More emotionally effective? More resonant?”

These are tougher questions, not only because they’re more subjective, but because they require skills that go beyond the command of language: insights into human nature, imagination, innovation, creativity, a mastery of pathos, ethos, and logos. These are harder things to teach. But we can try.

Some of the problem may lie in the tendency of literary-fiction writers to disregard what mass-market novels can teach us. These books are not always masterfully written, but—if the videos of readers weeping on BookTok are evidence—they are clearly tapping into human experience and making readers feel. A hell of a lot, apparently.

Consider Colleen Hoover, who self-published for years before readers drove her romance and young-adult novels to best-seller status. A lot of her books admittedly rely on “trauma narratives”—a critique that’s lately been wielded against some literary fiction as well. But readers keep reading her because they connect to her stories of women finding love while on the brink of financial collapse or seeking to break patterns of domestic violence. Say what you will about her sentences, but no Colleen Hoover fan thinks that ChatGPT can replace her.

To be fair, the best writing teachers were already pushing students to write with emotional honesty long before AI was breathing down their neck. The greatest lesson I ever got in the art of memoir was to write the story you felt, not a recounting of what was actually lived. A course in science fiction taught me that the complex emotions of humanity can sometimes best be conveyed outside the realm of reality. A novel workshop gave me the idea of the author as a maestro, conducting the reader through an emotional journey that should have many movements and variations.

And yet despite all of this, I’m not sure I actually believe that writing as art can be taught at all. One can certainly improve and gain greater mastery over the form. But the magic stuff that makes the great literary artists what they are cannot be manufactured and replicated. At least, not in a classroom. Only, possibly, out there in the wild world, by living and observing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see a one-woman show.

When the wildfire came ripping down into the town of Lahaina, Maui’s state-of-the-art emergency sirens did not sound. That much is sure.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, officially the deadliest in modern U.S. history, the decision not to sound these alarms has been one of the more baffling ones. Sirens are supposed to warn people, and shouldn’t more people have been warned by any means necessary? The official in charge of making the call, Herman Andaya, resigned Thursday, citing health reasons. And yet, under pressure, officials have also defended their decision not to sound the island’s sirens.

Whether they should have is a more complicated question than it might seem—even wildfire-evacuation experts I talked with were divided on it. Communication with the public is one of the most important parts of a wildfire evacuation, but sirens? Sirens are tricky.  

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

Tom Cova, who has been studying fire evacuation since the early 1990s, told me that he understood the argument in favor of using the sirens, and against. Such alerts, he explained, wake people up and can get them talking, seeking information—maybe even seeing fire or smoke for themselves. But a big, loud noise doesn’t answer questions such as what the best route out is or which roads are closed. In a case like the Maui fires, where little information was available and key routes seem to have been blocked, he wondered whether sirens might’ve simply created the same traffic jam survivors have reported being stuck in earlier.

Officials worried that people would confuse the sirens for a tsunami warning and run uphill—which in this case, would have been toward the fire. Erica Kuligowski, a professor who has been studying disaster-warning sirens for years, told me that such sirens are best used when the local population is trained to know exactly what they mean—and they’re accompanied by further messaging, such as an emergency text. Even if residents could be taught what sirens mean, Lahaina needs to think about its tourist population: You can’t train a tourist to know how to behave when a siren goes off. “They may be from Tornado Alley, and they’re visiting Maui,” Kuligowski told me over Zoom, from Australia. “And that siren means to take shelter in their home.”

The sirens were not the only tool officials had; they are a single flash point in the much larger conversation about how the Maui government handled evacuations from the deadly fire. Many survivors have reported getting no form of notification whatsoever. What happened there? Why were parts of a key escape route reportedly blocked? What happened in the nine hours between the fire’s ignition and its expansion? The fire was first reported at 6:30 a.m., and later that morning, officials sent out an alert saying that it was 100 percent contained. Flames didn’t sweep across the town of Lahaina until late afternoon. What unfolded in the interim? Why didn’t emergency officials partially evacuate—even if such evacuations would’ve been preemptive—given how disturbing the wind was that day?

Disaster response is a series of choices made by officials with very little time and under pressure. Preparation matters. So does experience. Already, as the facts come into view, they show that this was far from a perfect wildfire evacuation, if such a thing exists. And yet experts I talked to stressed that they are waiting for more information to fully assess what happened—and that Maui’s emergency managers were struggling with a bad fire, in a place that might have dealt with wildfire before, but never like this. A week ago, no one in the fire community would have predicted that the deadliest fire in modern American history would take place in Hawaii. It’s as if the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit the West Coast and not the Gulf. “Another thought experiment might be like, What if Reno had a tsunami?” Cova suggested.

[Photos: Lahaina, after the fire]

This fire was unprecedented. And yet unprecedented is the new normal. As Enrico Ronchi, an associate professor in evacuation modeling at Lund University, in Sweden, put it, “We are continuously crossing the bar of what we have seen until now.” Any community would have likely struggled with a fire like this, evacuation experts told me. In 2018, the Camp Fire—also a fast-moving fire on a dangerously gusty day—torched the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85 people. Until last week, it was the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Paradise was located in a fire-prone area of California. The town had a plan—and a good one at that. Cova would’ve given Paradise’s plan an A-plus. “Even the best-prepared communities can be overwhelmed,” he said. “Since Paradise, no one has been dealt a hand as bad as the Maui emergency managers and firefighters.”

What if the community had been more like one in California, where emergency managers and residents both have more firsthand experience with fire? “It’s hard to say… ,” Ronchi told me, hesitating. “It probably would not be the same story.” That doesn’t mean it would’ve been “a happy ending necessarily,” he said, but preparation does matter.

Researchers told me that every community might want to start thinking about a wildfire-evacuation plan, but especially those at high risk of fire. The U.S. Forest Service and the USDA offer a website that maps the wildfire risk across the United States. When I input Maui County, it glowed red—at higher risk than 80 percent of counties in the U.S.

[Read: Hawaii is a warning]

Just because something is “unprecedented” doesn’t mean it is unpredictable. “We keep hearing from certain elected officials and other people being quoted in the media, ‘we had no idea, this is unprecedented,’” Elizabeth Pickett, a co–executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, told the Honolulu Civil Beat last week. “But actually, those of us in the wildfire community, meaning our fire agencies, our forestry natural resource management community, we have long been working to increase our risk reduction efforts.”

Pickett has been at this for 15 years. She’s well aware that Hawaii is a fire-prone state, and has been pushing for better education. (One Hawaii-based researcher called her “the backbone of the wildfire community” there.) She told me that, in the past, she’s knocked on the doors of elected officials and handed them fire-risk maps for their district. “Maui is like the canary in the coal mine for our state,” she said over the phone on Friday. “It’s not a one off.” The goal cannot be just about getting communities in Hawaii up to speed with best practices elsewhere; fast-moving fires are requiring us all to plan differently. “We need to have a whole new conversation about evacuation,” she said. “Let’s acknowledge the reality of how fast this went.”

And what else can we do but prepare, with all the time and effort that takes? A good evacuation plan includes a full communication plan, with predrafted alerts and plenty of contingency plans. Early warning is key. Multiple evacuation routes should be thought through, roads and intersections perhaps optimized for a quick escape. Temporary refuge areas—extra-hardened school gymnasiums, for example—can be created as last-resort shelters. Experts stressed in particular the importance of planning for the most vulnerable: people without cars, children and older people, people with limited mobility, people who don’t speak the local language, people with disabilities. Tourists are also considered vulnerable. Many of those who died during the Camp Fire fell into one or more of these categories.

Nowadays, sophisticated evacuation-simulation programs allow planners to better draw up and evaluate their plans. Researchers can input information about a town (the type of vegetation, the type of homes, the traffic layout) and its residents (population, age, other demographics), and model how different fires might sweep through a community. Emergency planners can run these simulations over and over again, and see how traffic builds up under different scenarios, and who survives. They can leverage this technology to test if their plan actually gets everyone out.  

We don’t even know how many people died on Maui yet, much less who or how or whose fault it was. But their stories are starting to trickle out. Sixty-eight-year-old Franklin Trejos was trapped in the backseat of his vehicle, on top of a beloved golden retriever, whom he died trying to protect; a friend of his found his bones. Seven-year-old Tony Takafua was found with his mother and his grandparents in a car near their home.

This is what’s at stake. This is wildfire.

Zoom, the video call platform that shot to popularity during the covid pandemic is about about to lose its market share to a more powerful competitor—Meta’s WhatsApp.

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The company updates its terms of service after a backlash from worried users.

In March, Zoom changed its a small section of fine print in its terms of service, asserting all “right, title, and interest” to the data generated from user calls. The California-based videoconferencing company wants to use this data to train and improve its new artificial intelligence features.

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Zoom, the videoconferencing company whose product became synonymous with remote work calls during the pandemic, has joined the legions of large technology companies forcing most employees back to the office. The company told staff late last week that if they live within 50 miles (or 80 km) of one of its nine offices,…

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The company says staff living near offices should work in person at least twice a week.

When ChatGPT entered the world last fall, the faculty at SUNY Buffalo freaked out. Kelly Ahuna, the university’s director of academic integrity, was inundated by panicked emails. “It has me thinking about retiring,” one English professor confessed. He had typed a prompt into ChatGPT and watched in horror as an essay unfurled on-screen. There were errors, sure: incorrect citations, weird transitions. But he would have given it a B-minus. He anticipated an onslaught of undetectable AI plagiarism. Ahuna found herself as something of a spiritual mentor, guiding faculty through their existential angst about artificial intelligence.

The first year of AI college was marked by mayhem and mistrust. Educational institutions, accustomed to moving very slowly, for the most part failed to issue clear guidance. In this vacuum, professors grew suspicious of students who turned in particularly grammatical essays. Plagiarism detectors flagged legitimate work as AI-generated. Over the summer, some universities and colleges have regrouped; they’re trying to embrace AI at the institutional level, incorporating it into curriculum and helping instructors adapt. But the norm is still to let individual educators fend for themselves—and some of those individuals seem to believe that they can keep teaching as if generative AI didn’t exist.

[Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin]

Modernizing higher education is a formidable task. I graduated from college this past spring. Before the pandemic, my professors insisted that we print assignments out and hand them in—forget submitting online. Although ChatGPT was available for nearly my entire senior year, the university administration sent out only one announcement about it, encouraging faculty to understand the implications of the technology. My friends, meanwhile, talked incessantly about it. I don’t know anyone who wrote an entire paper with ChatGPT—or who would admit to it, at least—but people used it in other ways. Some asked it to generate practice-exam questions for them to solve. Others turned to it for help with their philosophy reading, asking the chatbot to explain, say, Parfit’s definition of a self-effacing theory. One of my friends asked ChatGPT how to get over her ex-boyfriend. (The advice was generic but excellent.) But only one of my professors ever mentioned it: Halfway through the spring semester, my computer-science professor announced that we couldn’t use ChatGPT to complete our codes. Then he said he would rely on the honor system.

Heading into the second year of AI college, some institutions are trying to develop a less technophobic approach. According to Kathe Pelletier, a director at the tech-focused education nonprofit Educause, the most enthusiastic AI adopters tend to be public universities or community colleges that serve large, diverse student bodies and see education as a means of social mobility. Arizona State University is piloting an introductory writing course in which an AI bot offers feedback on students’ work. The class is taught to remote learners at a low cost, and the AI could allow for something like peer feedback for students who take classes alone, on their own schedule. Administrators at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have organized a professor-led task force to suggest different ways for faculty to add generative AI to the classroom. The University of Florida launched a $70 million AI initiative in 2020 with funding from the chip-manufacturing giant Nvidia. Sid Dobrin, an English professor who is part of the initiative, says that it will sponsor a competition this year in which students can win prize money for the most creative use of generative text or image AI. These schools are preparing to feed employers’ hunger for AI-savvy graduates. “I always say: You are not going to lose your job to AI,” Dobrin told me. “You are going to lose your job to somebody who understands how to use AI.”

Other universities, however, still have no overarching institutional posture toward AI. Administrators are wary of announcing policies that could age poorly. Professors are left to figure out how to leverage the technology on their own. In its defense, this stance preserves academic autonomy and encourages experimentation. For example, the teacher of Harvard’s introductory computer-science course deployed a teaching-assistant chatbot this summer built based on OpenAI’s code. But the hands-off institutional approach also forces instructors, many of whom have yet to master the “Mute” button on Zoom, to be at the vanguard of a technology that isn’t fully understood even by the people who created it. In a recent informal poll by Educause, 40 percent of respondents said that they weren’t aware of anyone at their institution taking responsibility for decisions around how generative AI should be used. “A president or provost is thinking, Should I jump on this only to have it become the most unpopular thing in the world?” Bryan Alexander, who teaches at Georgetown University’s school of learning, design, and technology, says.

Some academics have been eager to add the alien technology to their classroom. Ted Underwood, who teaches English and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that every student should learn the basics of AI ethics. He likens the topic to the tenets of democracy, which even people who won’t pursue political science need to understand. Other professors see AI as a way to enliven instruction. The new introductory writing course at the University of Utah asks students to compare sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, and ChatGPT; professors say that using an AI bot is the easiest way to generate usefully bad poems.

Another faction within academia sees generative AI as an enemy. In the age of large language models, a student’s writing assignment can no longer reliably confirm whether they’ve understood a topic or read a text. Weekly reading responses and discussion posts, once a staple of higher education, seem useless. Some instructors are trying to adopt countermeasures. One SUNY Buffalo faculty member told Kelly Ahuna that he would keep his weekly online quizzes but employ technology that tracks students’ eye movements to detect potential cheating. Others seem to hope that prohibition alone can preserve the familiar pre-ChatGPT world. Most instructors at Bryn Mawr College have declared that any use of AI tools counts as plagiarism, says Carlee Warfield, the head of the school’s honor board. Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University, told me he refuses to abandon take-home essays. In his view, in-person exams aren’t real philosophy. They leave no time for rumination and serious engagement with a thinker’s work. “It’s gimmicky,” Hick said. “My pedagogy is good, my students learn, and I don’t like the idea of having to upend what’s been a tradition in philosophy for millennia because somebody has a new technology that students can use to cheat.”

[Read: The college essay is dead]

Many of the professors and administrators I spoke with likened generative AI to earlier waves of technological change; perhaps an analogy offered perspective and solace when confronting something so mystifying. They compared it to Wikipedia (riddled with inaccuracies), to calculators (students still learn long division), and even to microwave dinners (ChatGPT’s writing is a frozen meat loaf; a student essay is a marbled steak).

But the most common comparison was to the advent of the internet. Charles Isbell, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech, points out that the web did not immediately create the kind of nightmarish scenario that people had predicted. Supersonic email exchanges didn’t scramble our brains, just as the “Undo” button hasn’t eroded our sense of consequence. For now, Isbell isn’t concerned about students cheating with AI: If they submit a ChatGPT-written essay, the errors will give them away, and if they try to avoid detection by meticulously fact-checking the chatbot’s writing, they’ll learn the material. But just like the internet, which spawned smartphones and social-media sites that few people could have foreseen, AI will undercut the most basic patterns in higher education. “It’s perfectly reasonable to hold in your head both thoughts,” Isbell told me. “It’s not going to be the big, destructive force that we think it’s going to be anytime soon. Also, higher education will be completely unrecognizable in 15 years because of this technology. We just don’t really know how.”