Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Nicholas's avatar

    Grothendieck certainly changed the landscape but everything he did, whether it was representing functors, constructing new cohomology theories (and proving…

  2. Daniel Greco's avatar

    Yale isn’t running an admissions cycle this year but we’ll be thinking about how to do things next year, and…

  3. Mark's avatar
  4. Blake Myers's avatar

    Here are some more reactions from the math community on the OpenAI release: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100-solutions/

  5. Jason Brennan's avatar
  6. AG Tanyi's avatar

    Yes, my impression is that what is supposed to save mathematics is that its practitioners become Grothendiecks. The problem is,…

  7. Jc Beall's avatar

    Adding Michael’s and Brad’s numbers give at least 6 top-20 as measured by PGR. The original post pointed to “at…

Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures

Brian Leiter

Bizarre and pretty outrageous:

Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. 

Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures being used in this way—as out-of-context, extremely short clips in some cases—and several said they felt blindsided or angered by the launch. Most say they weren’t notified by the school and found out through word of mouth. And the testing I and others did on Atomic showed academically weak and even inaccurate content. Not only did ASU allegedly not communicate to its academic community that their lectures would be spliced up and cannibalized by an AI platform, but the resulting modules are just bad. 

Is this happening elsewhere?

(Thanks to Bennett Gilbert for the pointer.)

,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

2 responses to “Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures”

  1. Mike Titelbaum

    I don’t know how widespread this *behavior* is, but I know that the legal basis for allowing it to happen is spreading. Faculty need to be aware of their university’s policies regarding ownership of course materials they create—especially materials posted in online learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.). Some universities or public university systems having been trying to change their policies so that course materials created by faculty working for those universities automatically become the university’s property, to be used as the university sees fit, often without notifying the content’s creators.

    A good place to start on this issue is the AAUP’s statement on intellectual property and copyright:
    https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/teaching-and-research/intellectual-property-and-copyright

    Reply
  2. ASU faculty member

    I am a faculty member at ASU. Unfortunately, I can’t say I am surprised by Atomic. During last academic year, administrators at the university began to spend time inside something they refer to as “Endorphin Port”. This is not a website but a special app made available to all members of the university community. Faculty have faced pressure to teach classes in Endorphin Port, but only a few philosophers are opting in at this stage. Anyhow, that background information might put recent developments at the university into a clearer context. For those who aren’t aware of Endorphin Port, this short video (NSFW) is worth viewing:

    https://youtu.be/7cBiyWlYous?si=_lkPT1HZ5FkJrPlc

    Reply

Designed with WordPress