In May 2023, The UCSD Guardian published an article exploring how both humanities and STEM professors at UC San Diego were considering the implications of artificial intelligence on their students’ learning. One AI lab, one AI major, and two and a half years later, AI at UCSD has propagated faster than many thought possible.
A January 2025 study by the Pew Research Center reported that 26% of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 reported using ChatGPT for schoolwork — a 13% increase from 2023. AI use has grown so commonplace that UCSD, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the California State University system now facilitate and often encourage it in coursework, granting students access to free ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, or their own ChatGPT-inspired AI platforms.
UCSD’s AI platform TritonGPT, which launched in 2024, claims to help increase student and employee productivity by providing streamlined access to university resources. TritonGPT’s suite of assistants include a General AI assistant, a Phishing Analyzer, and an Expert Notetaker.
University officials are quick to remind students not to rely solely on AI for information. Sara Bock, associate director of content strategy on the University Communications Public Relations team, warned students in the UC San Diego Today rollout of the AI model that, “Like all large language models, TritonGPT may ‘hallucinate’ or provide inaccurate or out-of-date information, and users are encouraged to apply critical evaluation skills and remember that they are still responsible for any content they use that’s generated by the tool.”
Meanwhile, students like third-year social psychology major Cardinal Acovera have noticed a stark increase in professors encouraging AI use in the classroom.
“In this social cognition class that I’m taking this quarter, it feels like AI is very much pushed as a tool,” Acovera said. “A lot of it is generative, and [professors are] using it to summarize lectures. … There are benefits — like, it’s more concise than having to read all those lecture slides. But a big drawback of that is that sometimes, that [s—] is [f——] wrong.”
Aside from seeing AI in their course curricula, students are increasingly voicing concern online about professors using AI to grade assignments.
“My professor has been very transparent about using ai to grade our essays,” Reddit user Aware-Landscape-9499 wrote in a March post. “Doesn’t this just encourage students to use ai to write their papers so that it fits with the ai generated grading???”
Even in humanities circles, ChatGPT’s presence has grown impossible to ignore. Two years ago, professors were beginning to speculate about potential uses of the technology, but they now must grapple with its presence in the classroom, whether they want to or not.
“It feels like professors are becoming increasingly aware that AI is becoming a bit of an inevitability with many of the students, and so they’re either attempting to embrace it or pushing back as much as they can,” fourth-year literature and writing major Annika Ancheta said.
Within the literature department, a new concern has arisen over the past two years: large language models stealing students’ creative work. According to Ancheta, some of her literature professors are now concerned about students “feeding” their peers’ work to ChatGPT in order to write discussion posts and peer reviews.
“My capstone professor has an entire section in her syllabus dedicated to banning the usage of AI to write [peer reviews], which is an utter relief to me,” Ancheta said. “It’s horrible enough that someone would feed our work to an algorithm for others to steal, but the thought of getting back a peer review of AI jargon would make me bolt out of the workshop immediately.”
Acovera foresees a continued increase in ChatGPT use in his social psychology program and STEM programs, given the changes in his professors’ AI policies over the last two years.
“I think ChatGPT usage at UCSD will be way higher [in two more years], and it’s because it’s the easy way out,” Acovera said. “And also, professors are going to start encouraging it even more.”
As departments across campus work to navigate the implications of AI, both Acovera and Ancheta hope that the school will work to mitigate its harmful effects.
“It feels like I bump into someone who mentions ChatGPT helping them with some assignment or another every week or so,” Ancheta said. “I just hope that, in the future, AI usage on campus won’t damage people’s abilities to think and create for themselves and that there’ll be whatever safeguards necessary to prevent that from happening.”
