Editorial

Emerging from the depths of an unusually sunny and dry UK winter, AI’s appearance on the HE landscape seemed as sudden as the first signs of prematurely re-awakened nature. And like the merciless wind and violent hails that welcomed the budding flowers and blossoming trees, we found ourselves shocked and awed by the overwhelming abilities of the new apparatus for knowledge creation with its seemingly boundless potential. The initial fascination with the market-leading ChatGPT quickly gave way to a relentless sprouting of ever more sophisticated and specialised platforms offering some novel powerful tool for every need and fancy, from content creation to research evaluation, and any type and style of writing. From fear to enthusiastic adoption, the challenges, threats, opportunities, and joys of generative AI have already spawned a range of rich responses in HE, including publications, training sessions and passionate debates, with educators far and wide producing materials aimed at understanding the implications of AI in terms of assessment, research, truth, and the production of knowledge. In this new digital transformation, it is still unclear whether what we are facing is merely a question of ethics or a wholesale and unstoppable epistemic revolution.