This year's senior class at universities across the country is the first to have spent nearly its entire college career in the age of generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content like text and images.

As the technology improves, it's harder to distinguish from human work, and it's shaking academia to its core with some very

big questions. Special correspondent Fred DeSam-Lasro has the story for our series, Rethinking College.

And the principle of humanity says, treat all people as ends in themselves, never merely

as means.

About two years ago, Megan Fritz, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas

at Little Rock, began spotting something unusual about her students' writing.

You suddenly get an essay or a test dancer or some kind of assignment from a student

whose normal writing you're familiar with and you get something back that sort of sounds

like an official business document or a piece of technical writing, writing that sounds

very highly polished but very impersonal.

Impersonal because it likely wasn't written by a person.

This was the beginning of a turning point for higher ed, as generative

AI had swept through not only her campus, but college campuses across the country.

A survey last year found that 86 percent of college students are now using AI tools,

like CHAPGPT, Claude AI, and Google Gemini for schoolwork.

The reason generative AI has spread so quickly on college campuses is not hard to understand.

It's transformed tests that used to take hours, even days of writing and revision,

into something that can be done in mere minutes. For example, I can ask chat GPT, write me a 1,000-word essay on the topic of,

is it okay to lie?

And using a massive amount of data, it predicts and generates sentences on this topic instantly.

Fritz says the impact has been deeply disruptive.

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