After State Farm declared in late May that it wouldn’t sell any new home insurance policies in California, people shopping around for new insurance had one fewer option. When days later it was revealed that Allstate had quietly made the same decision last year, Californians are now left wondering: How bad is this? And how should the state respond?

The “crisis” in California’s insurance market was caused by “a laser focus only on affordability,” said Nancy Watkins, a principal at Milliman, an actuarial firm, at a legislative hearing on Wednesday. The companies are operating with “very crude tools” at the expense of availability and reliability, she said.

She said the current regulatory system is too rigid. “It’s like you’ve got your steering wheel locked straight ahead, you’ve got your speed set on cruise control, and now you find yourself on the Pacific Coast Highway,” she said. “What insurance company would agree to that?”

Home insurance premiums in California are a little cheaper than the national average — and much lower than premiums in other disaster-prone states like Florida and Louisiana. That’s without accounting for the fact that California has some of the most expensive housing in the country.

California still has about 115 companies offering home insurance, said Michael Soller, a deputy commissioner for the state’s insurance department. As for whether more companies are likely to follow State Farm and Allstate, “we don’t think that will happen,” he said.

Consumer and insurance industry groups and other experts have ideas for what they’d like to see California do in the wake of the news — few of which they agree upon. Here’s the debate over four of those ideas.

Require State Farm to keep issuing new policies

There’s disagreement whether this idea, backed by the group Consumer Watchdog, is legal.

The idea hinges on how insurance prices are regulated in California. Under current laws, insurance companies can’t just charge whatever they want: They have to submit their proposed rates to the insurance department, which they back up by explaining their projected costs, losses, revenue and more. State regulators can approve a company’s proposed rates, or deny them, if they think, for example, the rates are unjustifiably high, or so low that they could put the company’s finances at risk.

Harvey Rosenfield, founder of Consumer Watchdog, said if a company suddenly says that it’s not going to take the same number of customers that it had projected when it got the department’s approval, then it has changed the assumptions on which the approval was based.

“They granted themselves a de facto rate increase by reducing the risk” in a state where that’s illegal, said Rosenfield. The department could issue a notice to State Farm, he said, and tell the company it needs to keep selling new home insurance policies until it submits new rates and those rates are approved.

The insurance department disputes that it has the power to do this. “Their claims are not supported by law,” said Soller, the deputy commissioner. “There’s a reason why it hasn’t been done by any insurance commissioner before.”

Let insurance companies use forward-looking catastrophe models

The kinds of data and statistical models insurance companies can use to set prices may sound like a nighttime sleep aid, but it’s a matter of lively discussion in insurance circles.

When a company tries to justify rate changes, it is required to rely on past losses to project future losses. It can’t use factors like the locations of new homes it is covering — whether they’re in downtown San Francisco or rural wine country — or the increased risk of wildfires due to climate change.

“We do it in a very old-fashioned way, and it needs to be updated,” said Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, an insurance industry group that counts State Farm as a member. He supports the use of forward-looking models, which are generally provided by other private companies. California already permits insurers to use models for earthquake insurance.

If a company is trying to figure out how much it should charge for earthquake coverage, it would look at proximity to fault lines, Frazier said, but for wildfire insurance, California doesn’t do that.

“For wildfire it just says ‘Well, looking backward, what have you paid over the last 20 years for wildfire clients?’” he said.

Consumer groups generally oppose letting insurance companies use models, fearing that companies will use them to justify extreme price hikes, and that complex math will make scrutiny a challenge.

“They’re just very sophisticated crystal balls,” said Amy Bach, executive director for United Policyholders, a consumer group. Modeling companies generally see their models as intellectual property, which can pose a challenge for transparency. “Our fear is that they overstate risk,” said Bach.

About a week and a half after State Farm’s announcement, the insurance department said it would host a public workshop on use of models in insurance pricing, ahead of considering regulations. The workshop will take place on July 13.

On Wednesday, the Assembly’s insurance committee held a hearing on models. When asked by a legislator whether the department was moving toward incorporating catastrophe models, a department representative confirmed that it was.

“Historic losses do not fully account for growing wildfire risks, or risk mitigation measures taken by communities,” said Michael Peterson, a deputy commissioner at the insurance department, during the hearing.

Address the increasing cost of insurance — for insurance companies

Insurance companies are just like us: They buy insurance! When insurance companies buy it, it’s called “reinsurance.”

The cost of reinsurance has risen dramatically, and State Farm cited “a challenging reinsurance market” as one of the reasons it decided to stop selling new home insurance policies in California.

When insurance companies explain their costs to the insurance department as part of the process for justifying their prices, they aren’t allowed to include the cost of reinsurance. The department hasn’t historically permitted it, Soller said, because it doesn’t regulate reinsurance.

“What are insurers supposed to do when, on the one hand, the Department of Insurance is telling them ‘maintain your solvency’ and then, on the other hand, when their costs go up, you can’t charge for it,” said Frazier.

Insurance industry groups say it would help if they could incorporate the cost of reinsurance into their prices. But consumer groups say that the move would cause premiums to spike.

“Californians would see immediate massive rate hikes — both as soon as that went into effect and ongoing,” said Carmen Balber executive director of Consumer Watchdog. A reinsurance provider regulated by California would address problems she sees with the reinsurance market, Balber said, but that doesn’t exist currently.

Reduce the risk of disasters

The underlying problem is that disasters happen in California — at an increasing rate thanks to climate change — and that homes are at risk. They’re in the middle of the woods, or surrounded by flammable grasslands, or on the edge of bluffs that are expected to erode. Making homes less likely to burn, flood or collapse would be good for homeowners and would also make California feel less risky to insurers.

There’s no shortage of ideas for how to reduce risk, and there’s been action on this front in recent years. The insurance department, for example, has required insurance companies to consider whether homeowners take certain steps to protect their homes — like installing fire-resistant vents and clearing out vegetation under decks — in their prices.

California has set aside $2.7 billion for wildfire resilience over the past three years, according to the insurance department. When the department convened a group of environmental advocates, researchers, and public policy and insurance experts to make recommendations on how to reduce the risks of climate change, they came up with a long list. Among the recommendations:

• Create statewide hazard maps so that future risks are more clear to the public
• Increase funding to retrofit homes
• And apply fire-resistant building codes in areas with moderate to higher fire risk.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions would ultimately be the best way to reduce the risk, said Alice Hill, chair of the group convened by the department and a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. But the world will get warmer even if we reduce emissions, she said, so focusing on where and how homes are built remains important.

“That could mean not building in areas that are just becoming too risky,” Hill said.

###

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

Annie Mae Wentworth returned home on June 5, 2023 to be with her father, William (Bill) Nielsen; mother, Signe Rising Nielsen; brother, Robert and sister, Lily Victorine.

Annie was born on March 31, 1930 in Grizzly Bluff (Ferndale). She was the third child of Bill and Signe and was later joined by her sister, Betty. In 1938 the family moved to Loleta, where she spent all her growing up years working hard on the ranch and playing with her sisters and brother. They were all active in 4H growing up and enjoyed the friendships made there. She graduated from Fortuna High in 1948 and then moved to Sacramento to work for the State. It was there she met her husband, Herbert Wentworth. They were married in a double wedding with her sister Betty on January 14, 1951 in Ferndale.

Annie and Herbert had three sons; Michael, Richard and John. They lived in various places in Humboldt County before eventually settling in Ukiah for many years. When the marriage ended, Annie and the boys moved back to Fortuna where she lived for the last 50 plus years of her life.

Annie was active in the Danish (Valhalla) and Swedish Lodge and was proud to be a lifelong member. She loved Bingo, Gardening and being with her sisters and family. She loved family get-togethers.

Annie is survived by her sister, Betty Harper, and her three sons; Michael, Richard (Rick) and John (Diane Letner). Three Grandchildren; Michael, Kirsten, and Justin (Rachelle) and six great-grandchildren. Many nieces and nephews who have fond memories of visiting with her. We love you Annie.

Funeral services will be held Monday, June 19 at 1 p.m. at Ocean View Chapel under the care of Gobles Mortuary, Fortuna.

###

SECOND UPDATE:

• THE PIPPEN FILES: Uh, So, Was That Scottie Pippen At Shamus T. Bones Last Night or Was It Not?

###

UPDATE, JUNE 15: Upon further reflection this morning, we regret to say that we now entertain very serious doubts that this is Scottie Pippen, though he does look quite like, and we must admit that there is a strong chance that we were successfully pranked.

###

Photo courtesy Cayden Woods, who is one of the ballers pictured.

A gaggle of absolute ballers from Eureka decided to go hit up Shamus T. Bones for dinner tonight. 

Lo and behold, what did they find?

Not only their dinner, which would not have been particularly surprising, and not worth a post on the Lost Coast Outpost. Though the dinner is good.

What was surprising was what they found as they entered. That was: Six-time NBA champion and Basketball Hall Of Famer Scottie Pippen, who seems to have been passing through Eureka tonight.

We will let baller Cayden Woods — that’s @simply_caden_ on Instagram, where you should follow him immediately — tell the story:

me n my homies went to shamus for dinner, n while we were walking in he was kinda rushing out w his fam, so he j stppped for a quick flic n left, he shook our hands tho n was super chill when we asked him

What in the world could Scottie Pippen be doing in Eureka right now? We don’t have his cell phone number, so we could not ask. Also, there is no immediate evidence on Pippen’s socials of a Pippen sojourn to Redwood Country, nor any indication of why he might be in town.

But in any case: Welcome, Champ! The redwoods are nice and you should certainly take your family to visit them. I also recommend the pickup scene at Hammond Park, at 14th and F, where you will be recognized and celebrated as the god you are. Shame the kids are still in school, though.

###

The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors on Monday deliberated over some tough spending decisions as they considered the budget for the upcoming fiscal year and a dwindling pot of discretionary money to disperse from Measure Z, the county’s half-percent sales tax intended to maintain and enhance public safety and essential services.

Facing a $17.7 million deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year, the board was presented with a number of potential cost-saving measures.

One option, previously used in 2011 during another budgetary shortfall, would be to launch an incentive program offering severance payments to employees who voluntarily resign. This Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) would offer a $20,000 payment to eligible employees who have been with the county for 10 years or longer and who retire within the first month of the program. All other employees would receive $15,000 if they resign in that first month, with declining amounts offered over the following six months — first come, first served. 

When this approach was employed a dozen years ago, 24 employees took advantage of the program. The county paid $233,000 in incentives but wound up saving roughly $5 million in salary costs and $3 million in General Fund expenditures over the next three years, according to a staff report. 

Another option would be for the county to eliminate positions that have been vacant and/or unfunded for at least two years.

A third option, which is being researched by staff but not yet recommended or presented for implementation, would involve mandatory employee furloughs of various lengths — one or two days per month or a full week off between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Cost savings from this approach would range from $900,000 (for the unpaid holiday week) up to $5.4 million if employees were made to take two furlough days per month. 

Back on May 22, seeing the dark fiscal clouds on the horizon, the board implemented an immediate hiring freeze through the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year.

The total spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year is $578.55 million, which represents an increase of $7.2 million from the current fiscal year’s budget. The board is scheduled to adopt the new budget at a hearing on June 27, and the current draft would require the county to dip its General Fund balance to cover the $17.7 million shortfall.

The county also spent time considering how to allocate $397,000 in as-yet-un-obligated funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and $880,000 in anticipated Transient Occupancy Tax revenues from Measure J, a hotel tax approved last year.

Early in the hearing, Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell lamented the lack of sacrifice from county departments and funding recipients during this difficult time.

“[W]e have to make tough decisions and everybody wants a piece of the [pie] and nobody seems to be willing to give,” she said. “And I don’t know where we’re gonna get the money — and especially when everybody says, ‘No, not me. Pass the buck.’ The buck’s gonna really fall short.”

With much of Measure Z revenues already spoken for via ongoing grants and employee costs, the board had only $1.12 million in discretionary funding available to allocate for the 2023-24 fiscal year. That figure jumped up to $1.2 million after the board voted to defund a vacant IT position in the District Attorney’s Office.

After much deliberation — including some grilling of applicants by supervisors who wanted to know how little they could receive and still meet their goals — the board voted unanimously to award $320,000 to K’ima:w Medical Center’s ambulance program, $120,000 to Southern Trinity Area Rescue (STAR) ambulance services (whose territory extends into Humboldt County) and $195,438 to the Humboldt County Drug Task Force, with a small the remainder — roughly $562,000 — going to the Humboldt County Fire Chiefs’ Association.

But the board also noted the need to rethink how Measure Z funds are allocated in the future. 

Glenn Ziemer, member and former chair of the Humboldt County Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Measure Z Expenditures, emphasized the need for this. [Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Ziemer as the current chair. The current chair is Ginger Campbell. The Outpost regrets the error.]

“I truly believe with all my heart that unless you take some decisive, definitive action this year, you will lose any ability to normalize Measure Z and bring it back to the community service that it has been over the last nine years … ,” he said. “The simple fact of the matter is the normal inflationary costs of your payroll schedule … will totally overrun the fund and it will cease being the community-based benefit process it has been historically and simply turn into another line in the county’s personnel ledger.”

Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal defended his department’s large, ongoing claims on Measure Z revenues, saying that if those funds went away, his department would have to eliminate 35 deputy positions and pull back on specialized services, focusing only on “that basic level of service throughout the county of a 911 response.”

Honsal and Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson had a long discussion about whether and how the Sheriff’s Office might make do with less, if necessary. County staff and the board’s Measure Z ad hoc committee — comprised of Bushnell and Wilson — will continue deliberations on Measure Z spending in the coming weeks.

As for the budget, the board directed staff to use the $397,000 in ARPA funds to offset the “urgent additional funding request burden” on the General Fund next year. They also approved the staff’s recommended parameters for a voluntary separation program and directed staff to continue researching a mandatory furlough option.

Again, the budget is scheduled to be adopted at a hearing on June 27.

PREVIOUSLY:

• BEAR CUBS: The Zoo Now Has Two New, ‘Non-Releasable’ Bear Cubs Gracing the New Bear Habitat

###

Press release from the Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation:

Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria has been in partnership with the Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation and the City of Eureka and is the primary funder of the new bear and coyote habitat at Sequoia Park Zoo. The Tribe has given this place of learning to the Zoo and community to help tell the story of humans and bears in our region.

In spring, Bear River was notified of the arrival of two long-awaited bear cubs known as “Tule” and “Oak” from Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care. These “yearling” bears were determined non-releasable by California Department of Fish and Wildlife and were chosen for placement at Sequoia Park Zoo. As the principal supporter of the habitat, Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria is able to provide naming suggestions for the new bears.

As a way to respect, remember, and honor the tribal land on which he was found, Bear River would like for the male bear to retain the name “Tule.” Tule (pronounced Too-Lee) was only weeks old when he was found in April 2022 on the Tule River Nation Reservation. The local community spent several days searching for his mother but were unable to locate her, and the Tule River Tribal Police Department transported him to Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care for rehabilitation.

Bear River has chosen for the female bear to have her name changed from “Oak” to “Noni.” Noni translates to “black bear” in the Bear River dialect of Athapascan. The Athapascan language family is one of the largest in North America, extending from Alaska through the American Southwest, and includes the Humboldt County coast.

Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria wants to welcome Tule and Noni to our family, and we look forward to seeing both bears grow over the years.

Jessica McGuinty, a former Humboldt County resident best known as the founder of the Arcata-based Jessicurl company, has died at age 47, according to a Facebook post published by her husband, Chris Spohn, this morning.

Throughout her life McGuinty had lived with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and the chronic illness finally claimed her life on Saturday, Spohn wrote.

A lifelong roamer and traveler, forever moving from this place to that, McGuinty founded Jessicurl in 2002, after failing to find commercial shampoos and conditioners that suited her hair. Research on early Internet message boards for women with curly hair led her to develop her own, natural recipes, and she soon began bottling her formulas and selling them to others.

Jessicurl grew through her canny marketing — she never tired of telling stories about the merciless cruelties of the straight-haired children at her primary schools in Ontario, Canada — and soon her fledgling company moved into a factory space on West End Road. McGuinty would travel to trade shows to bond with her fellow “curlies,” and eventually became a go-to source when big media wanted to present anything about the plight of the curly-haired.

In 2010 she sold part of the company to a local investment group, partly so that she wouldn’t have to manage its day-to-day operations. She was much happier to be out meeting people and marketing her products.

In 2015, hoping that a warmer climate would improve her health, she moved to Medford and later to southern California, where she met and married her husband. Throughout, she kept her stake in the company she founded, and continued as its public face.

McGuinty was an early colleague for many of us at the Lost Coast Outpost. For years she hosted the weekly “Global Grooves” program on KHUM radio, our sister station, in which she would play music from a different place in the world each week. She was the world number one fan of the Bellingham, Washington-based Yogoman Burning Band, which seemed to play Humboldt three or four times a year for a while there, probably because she made them do so.

“Global Grooves” radio promo

She was well and widely loved. 

In 2013, McGuinty spoke at a TEDx event about the random, unforeseeable effects that your actions can have on strangers. The recording of that talk can be found below.

This spring, as debates were raging on college campuses about the proper role of generative AI in higher education, Diablo Valley College adjunct professor Frako Loden created an assignment to see how students in her American Cinema class interacted with ChatGPT.

For their final opinion piece of the semester, they were to pick a discussion question about the 1950’s movie “A Place in the Sun,” insert it into ChatGPT as a prompt, and then grade the response themselves. The AI got key details of the plot wrong in some cases, Loden said.

In the film, for example, protagonist George takes his girlfriend to a lake and she falls in and accidentally drowns, but ChatGPT says that he purposely killed her there. “That may be a subtle point, but it really does figure at the end when you evaluate his character,” said Loden, “ChatGPT kind of runs rough over that and suggests that he was planning it from the start and that he’s an evil dude.”

Loden’s assignment illustrates not only the limitations of ChatGPT — Loden said she found in her own research that many details of movie plots it gives are not only false, but “ideologically loaded” and “maybe even racist” — but how professors are increasingly experimenting with its use in the classroom. California’s public higher education systems have not yet created a formal policy regarding the use of generative AI, which can create images and text that are nearly indistinguishable from those made by humans. That leaves professors in the role of watchdog, preventing breaches of academic integrity. While some focus on cracking down on cheaters, a growing number have decided that the technology is here to stay, and are assigning work that seeks to convey to students the benefits of AI as a research tool while acknowledging its limitations and propensity for error.

“Faculty have to come to a decision, whether it’s in California or nationwide. And the decision is, do you want to adopt?” said Tony Kashani, a professor of education at Antioch University who is writing a book about the use of AI in the classroom. “On campus there’s a lot of contention about this.”

When it comes to AI, technology has moved more quickly than ethics and policy, said Kashani. He said bots like ChatGPT show great promise as a “writing consultant” for students. “It’s not often that students have a chance to sit down with a professor and have long discussions about how to go about this paper, that paper, how to approach research on this topic and that topic. But ChatGPT can do that for them, provided…they know how to use the right ethics, to use it as a tool and not a replacement for their work.”

That’s the approach taken by Stanford sociology professor David Grusky, whose syllabus for a recent public policy class allowed the use of AI-generated text in assignments under the stipulation they be cited in the same way a conversation with a human would be.

“It’s a conversation that can be evoked at will. But it’s not different in the content,” said Grusky. “You still have to evaluate what someone says and whether or not it’s sensible.”

He believes that AI can help teach students to evaluate the quality of sources, serving academia well in the long term. “I believe our job typically in kind of the world of undergraduate instruction is to try to help people become more thoughtful, more rigorous, more analytic.”

Stanford, after a push from professors, created a baseline policy forbidding the use of AI to aid in the completion of assignments unless otherwise allowed in a class syllabus. And some California college professors remain skeptical.

“I see it more of a problem than a benefit,” said Santa Rosa Junior College history and political science instructor Johannes Van Gorp.

The advent of generative AI has increased the workload of instructors who seek to stop cheating, he said, especially since software that checks for AI-generated content is imperfect.

“Faculty have to come to a decision, whether it’s in California or nationwide. And the decision is, do you want to adopt?”
— Tony Kashani, professor of education, Antioch University

Van Gorp has adopted a policy forbidding the use of artificial intelligence in his classes, running nearly every assignment that gets turned in through three different AI checkers to build confidence in the results he gets.

“At first I was reporting (AI use) through the system, but it was so ubiquitous that I just started, as bad as it sounds, giving zeros on the assignments with a note: ‘This is AI generated.’”

Still, Van Gorp said he has to acknowledge that “the world is shifting.”

“Things like (the grammar-checking tool) Grammarly or whatnot, those are AI programs as well. And so where do you draw the line? And I’m not quite sure I’ve figured that one out. And certainly the institutions haven’t.”

California State University’s Academic Senate, which represents faculty, passed a resolution in March calling for a working group on artificial intelligence in higher education, to be formed by the end of August. The working group would examine AI’s limitations, opportunities for professional development of faculty, and how to ensure academic integrity, coordinating the university’s response across campuses.

To make their point, faculty used ChatGPT to draft part of the resolution itself. “What level of academic dishonesty would this constitute on a CSU campus?” the writers asked, adding, “This resolution calls upon the CSU to consider how best to leverage this technology, understanding that AI will inevitably change the nature of education independent of any action the system takes.”

Generative AI is out there and will be here in the future, said Academic Senate Chair Beth Steffel in an interview. “If we ignore it or try to ban it, it is probably to everyone’s detriment.”

Faculty at the California Community Colleges have also pledged to develop a framework that colleges can use to create policies on AI by spring 2024. The University of California has had an AI working group since 2020, which has in the past recommended the technology’s use in counseling, student retention, admissions and even test proctoring, as well as calling for individual UC campuses to set up councils to oversee their use of AI.

A March survey by the college-ranking website BestColleges found that 43% of college students say they have experience using AI, such as Chat GPT, with 22% saying they’ve used it to complete exams or assignments.

“I imagine that number is going to grow,” said Camille Crittenden, executive director at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and a member of the UC workgroup. “So the teachers might as well be involved in helping them to use it responsibly, figuring out how to actually double check citations and make sure that they’re real.”

As universities grapple with setting policy, professors are flocking to social media to vent and ask questions. Many of the conversations show a split between professors who want to integrate the use of AI and those who fear allowing it into the classroom.

“I just caught a student using ChatGPT to answer questions on online quizzes,” one professor posted to Pandemic Pedagogy, a Facebook group made to assist faculty in navigating online teaching. “On my syllabus, I say that students’ work must be their own and plagiarism will result in a failing grade, but I don’t mention using these kinds of platforms…What should I do?”

(The Facebook group is invitation-only, but some posters gave CalMatters permission to cite their comments.)

Some wrote about the seeming futility of trying to catch cheaters, given the unreliability of software designed to flag AI-generated content.

“We should avoid assignments that try to ‘harness’ ChatGPT or other AI’s,” another commenter argued, adding that the services might not remain free of charge and could start returning answers that are shaped to benefit advertisers.

Elizabeth Blakey, an associate professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge, allowed master’s students in her mass communications class to use ChatGPT to help draft research proposals. “It’ll give you information, it’ll give you names, maybe some ideas or vocabulary words that you didn’t think of,” she said in an interview. “And then you can take it from there and use your own creativity and your own further research to build on that.”

She believes it helped reduce her students’ anxiety about the tool and taught them a new skill they can take into the workforce.

Beatrice Barros, one of Blakey’s students, said ChatGPT came in handy when she changed her project topic halfway through the semester but was nervous about not having enough time to complete it. Using the AI, she said, “helped me with the head start, like a motivation.”

But she learned how to navigate what the AI gave her with skepticism. “Sometimes it was very, very wrong,” she said. “It made me more aware that ChatGPT can sometimes trick you, maybe get you in trouble if you don’t read content.”

Her overall takeaway? “Sometimes it’s better to do your homework.”

“ChatGPT can sometimes trick you, maybe get you in trouble if you don’t read content. ”
— Beatrice Barros, Cal State Northridge student

Blakey’s colleague David Blumenkrantz gave students in his visual communications class a choice about whether to use AI to design a magazine. They could write their magazine’s proposal and premise, or have ChatGPT write it for them. AI-generated images could grace the magazine’s cover, with students adding in the typeface and titles over it. The only stipulation: that students explain which parts were AI-generated and why.

About a third of the class chose to use AI for the assignment, he said.

Blumenkrantz said he is currently partnering with a Nairobi University in Kenya to build up their photojournalism program and that his 63-page curriculum was mostly compiled from AI-generated content. He gave ChatGPT prompts, changed the responses to go more in depth into each topic, and fact checked them, he said. He spent weeks making the curriculum, he said, when it would have taken months without the AI-generated research, a result he called “astonishing.”

Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning, which helps professors design effective instruction, said she and her staff often hear from faculty like Blumenkrantz, who “want to understand better how to use AI in creative ways in their teaching.”

“On the other end of the spectrum, we have a lot of questions about how students are using AI to cheat. There’s a lot of concerns about academic integrity.”

As for her own take, she said, “I don’t think that AI is going to necessarily destroy education. I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize education, either. I think it’s just going to sort of expand the toolbox of what’s possible in our classrooms.”

###

Walker is a fellow with the CalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. This story and other higher education coverage are supported by the College Futures Foundation.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.