UCLA Introduces Literature Course Designed by AI

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) announced last week the first AI course in humanities, a new AI-designed Comparative Literature class that will be taught next winter 2025.

According to the official information shared by the university, the course—coded Comp Lit 2BW by the institution—will be taught by professor Zrinka Stahuljak as she had done in previous years, but the textbook, the assignments, and the teaching resources will all be generated by AI.

Professor Stahuljak—who teaches European languages and transcultural studies, and comparative literature—is using Kudu, an AI platform developed by UCLA professor Alexander Kusenko that generates textbooks, animations, tests, and more based on the material provided for the training.

The institution clarified that AI will focus on acting as an educational assistant, allowing the professor more time to focus on lectures and reviewing and editing the content provided by Kudu.

“Because the course is a survey of literature and culture, there’s an arc to what I want students to understand,” said Professor Stahuljak in the document shared by UCLA.  “Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically.”

To design the course and generate the material, the professor provided Power Point presentations, videos—including those recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic for remote teaching—and other material she had previously used for the compared literature class. Kudu used the information to design the course and saved Stahuljak around three months of work, and required instead only 20 hours of her time to revise the content generated.

AI is also being used to generate textbooks in South Korea and Google recently launched a new AI tool for learning called Learn About.