Generative AI and the hype cycle
It’s reasonable to ask if this is just another hype cycle. What if generative AI is ‘just another technology’, which will have a marginal impact on higher education. Will we look back on this period in 10 years time as an interesting, but largely irrelevant blip in the history of higher education?
![[../media/Hype-Cycle-General.png]]
One way to explore this is to compare it to another much-hyped technology that seems to have been part of a hype cycle: MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses.
Systems domesticate technology. We say this with MOOCs where the original conception became a bastardised version that simply reinforces existing structures and power in the higher education context.
Will generative AI be adapted, modified, refined, and tamed, so that it fits neatly into the existing institutional structures?
Or, is generative AI different in some fundamental way, so that it upends the higher education system?