UCLA says it will offer a comparative literature course featuring a textbook, class assignments, and teaching assistant resources developed by AI.
The comparative literature course will be offered in the winter of 2025, and will “be the first class in its humanities division with materials developed by Kudu” — a UCLA-developed AI system — the university announced last week.
The course, led by professor Zrinka Stahuljak, is a “study of selected texts from Middle Ages to 17th century, with emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing.”
“The platform was developed by Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and his former doctoral student Warren Essey,” UCLA said.
While Stahuljak’s course will be Kudu’s UCLA Humanities debut, the system is already being used this quarter in an introductory history course in the social sciences department, the university added.
Elizabeth Landers, a UCLA doctoral candidate in history, said it can take three to four months to create the course, adding that Kudu’s process requires professors to spend a maximum of 20 hours on material development.
“The rest of the process is managed by the team at Kudu,” Landers said. “We have all of the backend support to understand where the instructors want to go with the material.”
To create the course materials for Stahuljak’s comparative literature course, the professor provided Kudu with notes, PowerPoint presentations, and YouTube videos from her previous classes.
Stahuljak said that she expects this new AI approach to free up some time for her and her teaching assistants to devote more time to helping students with writing assignments.
“Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content,” Stahuljak said. “But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically.”
The professor added that students will be able to ask Kudu for help when they have questions about course material, and insisted that unlike ChatGPT and other similar AI tools, Kudu will draw information only from the resources Stahuljak has uploaded.
“It will only respond based on course content,” Stahuljak said. “So it’s there to help our students, but it also reduces the risk of them using ChatGPT to generate their homework assignments.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
