Trinity is considering instituting BoodleBox, a program that offers AI learning assistants for students in certain classes (depending on a professor’s preferences), providing them access to all-powerful premium generative AI gods. It also offers a program in which, if implemented, professors and students can create custom AI bots, serving essentially as “personalized AI tutors,” according to the platform’s website.
I didn’t come here to learn from a chatbot; I came here to learn from my professors and peers. After four years of doing just that, it’s jarring to watch the university consider outsourcing parts of teaching to BoodleBox, or whatever the AI flavor of the month is.
The purpose of instituting such a tool, ITS officials said, is to teach us about AI literacy and protect students’ data. But honestly, I don’t get what generative AI like this is supposed to be doing for students in class. If the plan is to use it for basic questions that every syllabus should answer — when’s something due, why I keep getting this question wrong, if this is a good essay idea — then BoodleBox is just a six-figure FAQ page.
Sure, maybe it’ll teach students how to refine their questions and get the answers they want from AI bots, but it’s probably not going to teach me about ethical AI use — arguably, the most important part. BoodleBox makes AI frictionless, which means students aren’t forced to confront the uncomfortable questions: How much water am I using? Whose labor am I devaluing? What creative work is being stolen to train these models? If Trinity was truly going to use this initiative to build AI literacy, we’d be having these conversations.
The truth is, BoodleBox isn’t a solution to anything real. We can drop the guise of searching for an ethical AI platform for students to use and call it what it is: BoodleBox is a lazy attempt to replace real teaching with automated shortcuts. It reinforces a double standard about who gets to use AI, and it completely ignores why students use it in the first place: We’re overwhelmed, under-supported and stuck in classes with assignments so pointless that we don’t care about them.
If I’m in a class I don’t care about, I’m definitely not using some professor-trained AI bot to help me write an essay or finish a problem set, especially not one they can monitor. That’s not a resource, that’s a trap. Dylan Corso, junior communication major put it best: “Trinity students are not dumb.” No student in their right mind would choose to use a surveiled, Big Brother software when there’s an alternate version available for free.
Then there’s the most annoying part: If I’m not allowed to ask ChatGPT to do my homework, why do professors get to ask it to help me? The double standard here is infuriating: one AI allegation — true or not — could ruin my perfect record of academic honesty. Now the Trinity administration is letting professors hand off their responsibilities to that same technology.
The biggest issue with BoodleBox, or honestly the Trinity administration’s approach as a whole, is that all of it ignores why students turn to AI in the first place. Ironically, that’s the gap that Trinity is trying to fill with AI. Don’t get me wrong, I know Trinity has fifty million tutoring systems and many amazing professors who are always willing to answer questions, no matter how stupid they are. But for every helpful professor who has always responded to my emails, there’s a professor who includes email etiquette in their syllabus and makes snarky comments in class about students who ask them “dumb” questions at midnight.
Students don’t run to ChatGPT because they’re excited to cheat and waste their parents’ money. They use it because it’s the only thing that will answer them whenever they need help. If human support isn’t consistent, of course students are going to look for something that is — even if it is wrong sometimes.
All of that being said, maybe I’m being closed-minded. Academic Technology Manager Kevin Hearn even said that AI is a “second coming of the internet.” Maybe BoodleBox actually does help students with AI literacy and does solve data privacy concerns that come with using free AI platforms, especially since it claims to follow FERPA regulations, which is more than free AI platforms do.
The thing is, I don’t care if those free AI platforms steal students’ data. Sure, there are legitimate concerns about AI companies training models on student work or selling aggregate data to third parties. But they’re not going to get much out of your average student’s half-finished chemistry problem set. And honestly, those companies getting unimportant data is a small price to pay to avoid being surveilled by my own university and facing even more AI accusations. If you’re putting in your social security number or life details into AI, then honestly, you deserve what’s coming to you.
Plus, everything we use already steals our data anyway. Tiktok probably knows more about me than my own mother does. If data privacy was really the concern, we should be focused on a social media cleanse, not whether students should use BoodleBox over ChatGPT.
The whole data privacy debate appears to me as a distraction from the actual issue: Students are disengaged. The solution: Don’t put students in a position where they have to use AI to pass their classes. Don’t discourage us when we come to you for help, no matter how trivial our questions may sound.
At the end of the day, this entire pilot program and subsequent discourse is less about AI and more about what everyone’s afraid of. Faculty fear cheating. Admin fear liability that comes from breaching FERPA regulations. ITS fears a data breach. But students? We’re not scared; we’re detached. And no amount of AI assistance is going to fix that.
This is a news analysis piece. For information about the issue, read our unbiased news coverage of the same topic.
*This column was updated on Jan. 28, 2026.
