AI Goes to College

When Better Models Widen the Gap: AI's Cost Divide in Higher Ed (AI Goes to College, Ep. 36) What happens to students when the best AI models cost ten times more than the basic ones? That is the question Craig and Rob keep circling in this episode, prompted by Anthropic's brief and strange release of Fable 5. Fable 5 arrived as a guardrailed version of Mythos, a model so good at exposing software vulnerabilities that Anthropic had restricted it to a small set of secure organizations. For about a

Episode 35: AI's Underused Capabilities and Hidden Risks What happens when a university scrapes faculty lectures from its LMS, feeds them into an AI course builder, and sells the result for five dollars a month without telling the professors whose faces appear in the videos? Craig and Rob cover a packed news cycle in this episode, anchored by two stories about institutional vulnerability. The Canvas ransomware attack that disrupted final exams at thousands of schools opens a conversation about s

When in your thinking process should AI show up? A new study suggests the timing matters more than the access. In this episode, Craig and Rob work through a recent CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference paper that found a counterintuitive pattern: participants who had AI access from the start of a 30-minute task wrote weaker reports than those who got AI late or had no access at all. Same tool, same task, opposite result. The hosts connect the finding to Herbert Simon's satisficing concept

AI Goes to College, Episode 33: Accessibility Hacks, 81,000 Interviews, and the Choppy Waters of Academic AI Higher education is drowning in accessibility deadlines, grappling with what 81,000 AI interviews reveal about how people actually use these tools, and watching the academic publishing system creak under new pressures. In this episode, Craig and Rob dig into all three, with practical advice, a few uncomfortable truths, and their usual mix of optimism and healthy skepticism. The Accessibil

Craig and Rob kick off this episode with a deep dive into Claude's Constitution — the 84-page document Anthropic released to explain how Claude is governed. The document lays out a four-part hierarchy of priorities: be broadly safe, be broadly ethical, follow Anthropic's guidelines, and be genuinely helpful — in that order. Craig walks through the key language, and both hosts zero in on the uncomfortable questions it raises. Who gets to define "broadly ethical"? Whose values count? Craig points

Dr. Bette Ludwig spent 20 years in higher ed working directly with students before leaving to build something different — a Substack (AI Can Do That), a consulting practice, and most recently, the Socratic AI Method, an AI literacy program that teaches students how to think critically alongside AI while keeping their own voice intact. That last part is the hard part. Craig opens with the question that drives the whole episode: Socratic dialogue requires you to already know enough to ask good que