Teaching Nonprofits in the Era of ChatGPT

First of all - let me say how excited I am to be back blogging.  As some of you may know, I have been the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the last five years, and as a result, I had to step back from blogging as well as many other things.  Sadly, efforts to clone myself failed miserably.  Now that my time in academic purgatory administration has come to a merciful end, I'm glad that Lloyd Mayer and all the the folks at Nonprofit Law Prof Blog were willing to have me back as a regular poster.  

For those readers who are academics, you know that it is that time of the summer to turn to those Fall syllabi, if you haven't done so yet. As I prepare to teach Nonprofits for the first time in a bit, I'm thinking a great deal about how to teach it and other drafting-heavy classes in a world with ChatGPT and other generative AI. I regularly use Nonprofits and my Estate Planning class (likely coming this spring) as a platform to teach the appropriate use of forms and samples.  I think that we can and should teach ChatGPT as just another type of form or sample - a starting point and not an ending point.   To know how to evaluate a form or sample, including text created by generative AI, one must know what good drafting looks like.  As a result, I'm thinking about how to mix original drafting with purposefully generated AI language.  It feels like things like bylaws and compensation policies are great places to do this kind of work.

• If you are an academic, are you thinking of doing this?  Do you have thoughts on exercises or assignments?  Thoughts on academic integrity issues?
• If you are a nonprofit professional, how are you using generative AI in your practice?  What skill sets do you want to see from graduates coming out of law school?

There were some great discussions at SEALS this year (a law prof conference for those of you who aren't academics)  on this topic, so I'd love to see some continuing work in this area.  I do think it is really important for practitioners to weigh in on this, however - when it comes to AI, I think that many law profs immediately start with either "It's cheating" or "How will they learn to write?"  Those are concerns that we need to address but we can't use those concerns simply to avoid AI -  I think we put our head in the sand if we don't acknowledge generative AI ... not as the future, but as the present.

What say you all!???

Originally, Elaine Waterhouse Wilson (aka eww)

(no part of this post was created using generative AI!)