Academia

HEPI, a UK higher ed thinktank, released the results from their 2025 survey of AI use by students. There’s a lot in the report, so here’s a few quick highlights. The big headline is that basically all students are using genAI: In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. The main uses of GenAI are explaining concepts, summarising articles and suggesting research ideas, but a significant number of students – 18% – have included AI-generated text directly in their work. ...

This week we have drones in Ukraine and SpaceX’s totally-not-a-cock rocket. The use of drones in Ukraine is advancing the state of the art very, very rapidly. First we had drones trailing fibre optic cables to avoid jamming, now there’s drones that navigate via camera and landmarks and, very shortly, autonomous kill decisions: IEEE Spectrum - Ukraine’s Killer Drones A very hot take on Starship, SpaceX’s big “go to Mars” rocket: Starship was doomed from the start. I’m not informed enough to assess the post’s validity, but the thesis is that Starship is just too heavy, and that making it lighter makes it too fragile in ways that just can’t be fixed. There’s updates as well - 1 and 2

A very late set of weekly links! This time it’s heavy on AI and it’s impact on research and teaching. Plus cyborg cicadas. First up: A NYMag article on LLM use at Universities went viral (at least in my education and AI heavy feeds!) last week. So that’s not the link as you’ve probably already read it. Instead, here’s Benjamin Breen on how AI makes the Humanities more important and also wierder and Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? from the New Yorker. ...