EDUCATION If Hollywood central casting ever wants to portray a beloved instructor from an idealized past, they could do worse than University of Texas at Austin Professor Steven Mintz. Over four decades of teaching, Professor Mintz has published books and articles on topics as diverse as the psychology of prominent Anglo-American literary families and political good vs. evil. In collared shirts, with graying hair, Mintz can’t suppress his smile as he teaches. Students adore him: among hundreds who have anonymously rated Mintz online, his average rating is a perfect five out of five, with posts such as “easily the best orator I’ve ever witnessed,” “his lectures feel more like storytelling than class,” and “passionate about what he teaches.” Professor Mintz, frankly, excelled as a professor long before the development of LLMs. So you might have expected him to have reacted with indifference or hostility to the late 2022 public release of GPT-4’s cousin, ChatGPT. Instead, this seventy-year-old scholar had the same reaction that I did when he saw the power of GPT: he wanted to use it. Right away. 23