Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson recently implemented an unexpected allowance in his classroom. Now, when completing assignments, students are welcome to rely on artificial intelligence to generate text.

The technology has ballooned in popularity in the last year with the release of applications that can mine publicly available data sources to generate complex content at lightning speed. This ascension has sparked a broader debate about how AI can be utilized ethically across a whole range of use cases, from academia to the enterprise. Brynjolfsson, senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and director of HAI’s Stanford Digital Economy Lab, argues the answer is not ignoring the new technology. “We can’t freeze in all the things we were doing in the past. The only way to succeed is to embrace it,” he says, “but it can make errors and it’s not perfect. So, we have to adapt accordingly.”

‍