A comparative literature class at the University of California, Los Angeles will be taught with an AI-generated textbook in 2025. This marks the first time the college will use the system for a Humanities course, though it’s already been deployed in an introductory history class on campus in the most recent semester.
UCLA announced the forthcoming AI textbook in a blog post. Professor Zrinka Stahuljak is teaching the class, History & Fiction: Survey of Literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century, and is bullish on the use of the AI-generated course materials. “It allows us to spend more time teaching basic analytical skills, critical thinking and reading skills, in a consistent manner—the things professors are best at doing,” she told UCLA. “Those are hard things to do when you have 300 students in a classroom, but this allows us to do them much better.”
The company that generated the textbook is called Kudu. As angry as I often am about the proliferation of shitty generative AI in our lives, it’s hard for me to be mad at Kudu. College textbooks and the economy around them have long been a nightmare. For decades, printing presses churned out massive textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars.
They’d disrupt the used market by making small changes to a few pages, reprinting everything, and then charging students for a new edition. Worse was the proliferation of expensive “access codes.” A student who saved cash by buying an outdated textbook would get hit by a charge for a one-time use code, sometimes as high as $100, to access online course materials.
Kudu is charging students $25 per semester to use the textbook. It’s all accessed online so there’s no weighty book to haul across campus.
According to Kudu and the ACLU, the coursework was created in collaboration with the professor. This is a more complicated process than simply feeding everything into an LLM and having it spit out the results. The textbooks are custom-made for each class and take upwards of four months to produce. “To create the new textbook, Stahuljak provided Kudu with course notes from previous iterations of the class, along with PowerPoint presentations and YouTube videos she self-produced for remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic,” UCLA said.
What pops out on the other end is an interactive system. Once something is generated, Kudu pays the professor to fact check and critique the work. “For the comparative literature course, content was vetted by Stahuljak and Jakob Johnson, a history major who graduated in 2024,” UCLA said.
There are many written bits, as well as videos and course assignments. A video on Kudu’s website demoing the tool shows the Vlogging Brothers, Hank and John Green, discussing nuclear science and Roman history. The system also comes with a built-in chatbot, of course, that students can talk to if they have questions.
The LLM is only trained on the material and has no access to anything outside of it. “It will only respond based on course content,” Stahuljak told UCLA. “So it’s there to help our students, but it also reduces the risk of them using ChatGPT to generate their homework assignments.” Kudu also claimed it has a system to detect when a student is generating answers using AI systems.
Stahuljak said that Kudu will save her and her teaching assistants time and allow them to focus on their students instead of the coursework. “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,” she said.
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