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  • NATURE INDEX

What would an AI university look like and how might it change education?

From lectures by avatars to entire qualifications, higher education centred around AI is just around the corner.
By
  1. Jackson Ryan

    1. Jackson Ryan is a freelance science journalist in Sydney, Australia.

Looping animation of circuit board, from which building and several golden trees rise out of.

Illustration: Spooky Pooka

Pan Hui has already been replaced by artificial intelligence — and he did the replacing himself. In 2023, one of his students mentioned that they were a little bored seeing the same professor every lesson and might enjoy being taught by some different faces. This gave Hui an idea: why not use generative AI and an avatar to teach the students instead.

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Nature 648, S92-S95 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03950-4

This article is part of Nature Index 2025 Young universities, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

References

  1. Pang, C. C. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.03525 (2024).

  2. Leong, J. et al. in Proc. 2024 CHI Conf. Hum. Factor. Comput. Syst. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642393 (2024).

  3. Dang, H., Benharrak, K., Lehmann, F. & Buschek, D. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.09323 (2022).

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