"Driven by a rapid proliferation of reports about ChatGPT, as well as a lack of reports around the use or prevalence of the tool in higher education settings, we were interested in exploring the degree to which college and university websites mention this particular technology. Institutional websites serve many purposes for many different audiences. They reach students, faculty, staff, and the general public, and they include information on admissions, calendars, research, news, events, and financial aid, as well as teaching and learning activities and practices. Whereas institutional websites can be a rich source of information as independent resources, they also provide a collective function in that they can help us see topics of interest across the higher education landscape. For example, institutional websites were one of the ways individuals identified nationwide campus plans and decisions for closures and pivots with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, and those websites were also used to estimate and identify the prevalence of proctoring tools in North American higher education settings.Footnote3

In this article, we apply the same data-retrieval and analysis methods we used to estimate the use of proctoring tools mentioned above to determine how widely ChatGPT is mentioned on college and university websites in Canada and the United States. Using these data, we also identify the ways in which ChatGPT is mentioned. We focus on ChatGPT, rather than the family of technologies under the generative AI umbrella, because this tool has recently garnered the lion's share of attention. As a result, mentions of ChatGPT can function as a proxy of thinking about generative AI in general." - Article excerpt.