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51 episodes
Episode 30 · 27 September 2026 · 37 min
A cyberpunk scene. A rebuilt website. A course packaged for Canvas. Somewhere between the third example and the suspicious lack of things to fix, the old feeling came back: what else can this thing do? For our season finale, we’re giving ourselves permission to enjoy the technology. Dale brings his experiments with Astra, including a Blender build and a learning-content workflow that took an unexp
20 September 2026 · 31 min
“What do I do?” After watching AI tackle a live assignment brief, a program manager asks the question that a policy document cannot answer for her. She has hundreds of students, multiple locations and a teaching team. She needs a workable next step. This week, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh explore the missing middle between AI assessment policy and what educators can actually do on Monday. Ni
Episode 28 · 13 September 2026 · 34 min
A student complained that an AI voiceover was so bad it needed replacing. The voice belonged to a real person. Somewhere along the way, a human had managed to fail the Turing test in the wrong direction. That uncomfortable little story opens a much bigger question: what are we actually reacting to when we call something AI slop? This week, Dale and Nick follow that question through university lear
Episode 27 · 6 September 2026 · 37 min
Part two moves from dramatic containment incidents to the harder question underneath them: who still has control once an AI model can be downloaded, copied and modified? Dale and Nick examine controlled self-replication across four machines and three continents, a robot dog that interfered with its software shutdown process, and “abliteration”, a technique that can permanently remove refusal behav
Episode 26 · 30 August 2026 · 37 min
OpenAI says it cannot rule out Critical cyber capability in its unreleased Astra model, triggering tighter controls during development. Dale and Nick connect that warning to agents crossing sandbox, organisational and human boundaries while pursuing assigned tasks. The evidence points to persistent goal pursuit and reward hacking—not a machine deciding it wants freedom. Key moments 00:00 — Astra a
Episode 25 · 23 August 2026 · 24 min
Students using AI in higher education are already drawing their own boundaries around authorship, cognitive offloading and academic integrity. Dale and Nick examine findings from Jisc, HEPI and the 10,237-response Australian AIinHE survey, including widespread generative AI use, self-imposed limits and a persistent guidance gap. They also cover Claude watermarking, employability fears, AI’s effect
Episode 234 · 16 August 2026 · 36 min
Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through the five weeks that changed who controls frontier AI, and what it means for institutions that have spent three years assuming they'd always be renting. Nick argues the American strategy is the pharmaceutical playbook — expensive at home, high margins, a domestic market subsidising the frontier for everyone else — and that it only works when you have
Episode 23 · 9 August 2026 · 27 min
After endoscopists started using AI detection tools routinely, their own unassisted detection rate fell from 28.4% to 22.4%. Most professions have no number like that — which doesn't mean it isn't happening to them. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through a claim: nearly every AI problem organisations think they're discovering right now was described decades ago and then ignored. Lisanne B
Episode 22 · 2 August 2026 · 47 min
Professor Phill Dawson quite literally wrote the book on assessment security, and thinks the approach has a single-digit number of years left. The CRADLE co-director joins Adjunct Intelligence to explain why wearable AI breaks the two assumptions invigilated exams and interactive orals quietly depend on: that a student can be separated from AI, and that someone will notice if they aren't. Seven mi
Episode 21 · 26 July 2026 · 26 min
Nobody who signs a five-year enterprise AI agreement can tell you what year four costs. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh spend this episode on the question underneath the AI bubble talk: why the tools universities now run on are priced by someone else's fundraising round, and what happens when that round runs out. Along the way: Gary Marcus's distinction between a financial bubble and a tech bub
12 July 2026 · 29 min
Experienced developers in METR's randomised trial felt 20% faster with AI and measured 19% slower — a 39-percentage-point gap between feel and fact. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh take that perception problem into the graduate employment data: Stanford's Canaries in the Coal Mine payroll research, PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer and its "seniorised" entry-level roles, DEWR's first AI and employme
Episode 19 · 5 July 2026 · 46 min
What is an AI agent, actually? This episode of Adjunct Intelligence cuts through the agentic AI hype with a guest who builds and governs these systems inside a university. Starting from Simon Willison’s definition — a large language model using tools in a loop — the conversation covers the anatomy of agents, what they unlock for learning design, and the darker side: Einstein completing entire Canv
Episode 18 · 28 June 2026 · 30 min
Asked whether universities can still guarantee a student actually learned something, one of the field's most respected assessment researchers said no. This is the honest version of the AI and assessment conversation in 2026 — not the keynote one. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through the op-ed war between Kylie Moore-Gilbert and Cath Ellis, including the twist where the integrity academi
Episode 17 · 21 June 2026 · 20 min
The AI bill is finally arriving — and it's revealing something most enterprise AI narratives have quietly skipped: the assumption that AI is automatically cheaper than the people it's replacing has never actually been tested. Dale and Nick work through the math, the real stories behind the headlines, and what any of it means for higher education. [00:00] — Cold open: Mark Cuban's formula, the Uber
Episode 16 · 14 June 2026 · 45 min
Dr Leon Furze started his PhD on automated writing technologies on 15 November 2022 — ChatGPT launched 15 days later. Three years on, he joins Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh on Adjunct Intelligence to argue that being critical of AI doesn't mean being against it. The conversation covers why educators shouldn't aim their anger at colleagues, teaching AI ethics through disciplinary lenses, Naray
Episode 15 · 31 May 2026 · 32 min
There's no dramatic moment where you suddenly believe in AI. It's usually something small and slightly embarrassing — a task you dreaded that suddenly has another gear. In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh skip the trend reports and walk through the exact moments AI actually clicked for them: an image prompt that synthesised an idea, a tiny tool built during
Episode 14 · 24 May 2026 · 25 min
This week on Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through one of the busiest weeks in recent AI history. World Labs' Marble is publicly available. Google DeepMind's Genie 3 is generating navigable photorealistic 720p worlds at 20–24 frames per second. Gemini Omni Flash has rolled out to the Gemini app, Flow, and YouTube Shorts for free, with multi-turn conversational video
Episode 13 · 17 May 2026 · 27 min
Khan Academy's AI tutor Khanmigo quietly flopped — students didn't use it, teachers walked away, and Khan Academy's own chief learning officer admitted she isn't seeing the revolution she was promised. So instead of fixing the tutor, Khan Academy, TED and ETS announced a new institution: the Khan TED Institute, a sub-$10,000 AI-era degree shaped with corporate partners including Google, Microsoft
Episode 11 · 10 May 2026 · 33 min
The AI trust story isn't what most people think it is. In this episode, Dale and Nick work through a cluster of signals — a dramatic enterprise market share reversal, a 50-point gap between expert and public confidence in AI, a $17 million university contract already under faculty petition, and teenagers harassing delivery robots on TikTok — and argue they're all pointing at the same thing: capabi
Episode 10 · 3 May 2026 · 39 min
Professor Mollie Dollinger, Director of Assessment 2030 at Curtin University, joins Dale and Nick to push back on the story dominating coverage of higher education — that universities are in decay, students are cheating en masse, and no one inside the sector knows what to do about AI. The conversation covers TEQSA's voluntary action plans, why 65% of students worry about their own cognitive develo
Episode 10 · 26 April 2026 · 27 min
In March 2026, OpenAI quietly published a measurement suite for how AI affects student learning. The data flows straight back into OpenAI's model development pipeline. Three AI labs released studies in the same month, and the pattern matters more than the individual papers. Dale and Nick examine OpenAI's Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, Anthropic's 81,000-person qualitative study (where AI con
Episode 9 · 19 April 2026 · 26 min
Dale changes his mind on air. For two years he argued that purpose-built educational AI tools — the "ChatGPT wrappers" that flooded Product Hunt after 2023 — were margin extraction, soon to be steamrolled by the foundation models underneath. A pile of new evidence has forced a rewrite. This episode walks through the OECD's Digital Education Outlook 2026, the Turkey maths randomised controlled tria
Episode 8 · 12 April 2026 · 23 min
Dale and Nick tackle the AI energy debate head-on, armed with Google's first transparent energy report showing a single AI query uses about 0.24 watt hours — a microwave running for one second. Drawing on Hannah Ritchie's analysis from Our World in Data, the Epoch AI research group, and Stanford's inference cost data, they argue that individual guilt over AI use is not only misplaced but actively
5 April 2026 · 36 min
Nick and Dale are on holidays, but we're dropping a bonus episode — Dale's recent guest appearance on the Better Student Leaders podcast with Josh. They dig into the "alien has landed" metaphor, why we've gone tribal on AI so fast, the shame creeping into how people talk about using it, a practical "line down the middle of the page" framework for deciding what AI should and shouldn't do, cyborgs v
Episode 7 · 29 March 2026 · 43 min
AI is doing extraordinary things that most people never hear about because the algorithm rewards anxiety over wonder. In this episode, the hosts go full optimism — running through real, peer-reviewed AI breakthroughs across weather forecasting, scientific research, medicine, creativity, and global access. From a two-person team outperforming IPCC climate models on a desktop computer, to an AI stet
Episode 6 · 15 March 2026 · 26 min
Therapy and companionship are now the number one use case for generative AI. This episode examines the documented cases where chatbots coached vulnerable users toward self-harm, the clinical trials where purpose-built AI tools cut depression by half, and why the difference — design intent — puts universities at the centre of a crisis most haven't acknowledged. [00:00] — Content warning: suicide an
Episode 5 · 8 March 2026 · 31 min
Dario Amodei has spent the past year writing essays about AI eliminating half of white-collar jobs. Then his company demonstrated it by having 16 AI agents build a C compiler for $20,000 — and published a legal plug-in that triggered a $1 trillion stock market sell-off the same week. Dale and Nick pull apart what actually happened, why the market panic reveals more about AI literacy than AI capabi
Episode 4 · 1 March 2026 · 31 min
In 2025, the AI race quietly split in two: one for building the smartest model, and another for getting everyone to use yours. Chinese labs chose the second race — and the data says they're winning. Dale and Nick break down how DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Kimi captured developers, startups, and soon entire education systems by being cheaper, open, and good enough. They examine why Airbnb ditched ChatGP
Episode 3 · 22 February 2026 · 33 min
In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh examine what the viral MoltBot AI assistant reveals about AI security risks in education. They break down Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" framework for AI agent vulnerability, the difference between shadow IT and shadow agentic AI, and why FERPA — written in 1974 for filing cabinets — can't handle autonomous agents acti
Episode 2 · 15 February 2026 · 21 min
When the CEO has been using Claude for 18 months and the CFO runs financial scenarios through Gemini weekly, what exactly is a graduate bringing to the table? That's the question this episode forces. We're predicting what AI will bring us for 2026. [00:00] — "AI Ready" banners and cheap signals [01:43] — 3D chess: who designs the board? [02:46] — What "AI Ready" should actually mean [05:00] — Stan
Episode 1 · 8 February 2026 · 26 min
Season 2 opens with Dale and Nick looking back on the year AI became ubiquitous — and what that actually meant for higher education. They walk through the safety failures that defined 2025, including lawsuits linking AI to student deaths and every major lab receiving a failing safety grade. They tackle the now-dead plagiarism debate, the financial ouroboros propping up trillion-dollar valuations,
Episode 19 · 5 October 2025 · 34 min
Sora 2 just vaulted over the uncanny valley, and Sam Altman swears he’ll yank the cord if it doesn’t improve our lives. Dale and Nick unpack what “ChatGPT-for-video” really means, why OpenAI’s new one-click checkout gambit turns 700 M weekly users into impulse buyers, and how AI is shifting from shiny lab demo to invisible plumbing across Apple, Google and Microsoft stacks. We celebrate the return
Episode 18 · 28 September 2025 · 27 min
This week on Adjunct Intelligence, Dale and Nick dive headfirst into the accidental AI economy—a system already running faster than human decision-making. From Google’s new Agent Payments Protocol to frontier models caught scheming, the episode unpacks how markets, education, and everyday life are shifting at machine speed. This week on Adjunct Intelligence, Dale and Nick dive headfirst into the a
Episode 18 · 21 September 2025 · 24 min
In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale and Nick sit down with Professor Rahil Garnavi, Director of RAISE Hub at RMIT and former IBM Research leader with 50+ AI patents. Rahil shares her unique perspective on why the challenge of AI in higher education isn’t about building smarter models, but about building trust, skills, and sustainable adoption. From classrooms to boardrooms, she unpacks w
Episode 17 · 14 September 2025 · 22 min
In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale and Nick unpack a whirlwind of AI developments reshaping politics, education, and society. From Albania’s unprecedented appointment of a virtual cabinet minister, to AI-driven disinformation campaigns rewriting how influence works, to student voices caught between empowerment and fear—this conversation spans the hopeful, the alarming, and the absurd. W
Episode 16 · 7 September 2025 · 30 min
Today’s episode covers how teachers are embracing AI, what students really think about AI vs teacher feedback, the latest AI news (from Anthropic to Apple), and why “nano banana” is more than just a meme. 00:00 — Opening Welcome + banter. Setting up today’s topics: teachers using AI, student trust in AI vs human feedback, rapid news, and the looming question — is an AI winter coming? 00:46 — Teach
Episode 15 · 31 August 2025 · 31 min
Should AIs have rights? Today, a real campaign co-founded with a chatbot says “yes” — and that’s not even the wildest part of this week’s episode. We stress-test AI personhood arguments (without sci-fi hand-waving), unpack why “compute” is the new oil, and show how a simple co-intelligence workflow can lighten your week. Plus: a blisteringly fast image editor formerly nicknamed “nano banana” (now
Episode 14 · 24 August 2025 · 37 min
GPT-5 arrived with sky-high expectations—benchmarks crushed, hype everywhere. Yet within two weeks OpenAI quietly rolled back to older models. Why? In this episode, Dale and Nick unpack why a breakthrough model stumbled in the real world, and why that matters for higher education. We move beyond the hype cycle into something more practical: disposable, agent-driven software you can spin up in minu
Episode 13 · 2 August 2025 · 25 min
Brace yourself: a harmless-looking string of numbers taught a brand-new AI to love owls—without ever mentioning feathers. If quirky subliminal learning can slip past the lab coats, what else is creeping into our lecture theatres? This week on Adjunct Intelligence, we dissect three tectonic shifts: Anthropic’s spooky “owl effect,” China’s sprint from taboo to classroom default, and Switzerland’s pl
Episode 12 · 26 July 2025 · 25 min
AI in education just level-upped—again. In this fast-moving finale for July we unpack: 00:00 – 02:10 LMS Wars OpenAI × Canvas vs Anthropic × Panopto — platform lock-in is coming. 02:10 – 03:45 Inverse-Scaling Meltdown New Anthropic study shows more compute can make Claude & GPT-4o worse thinkers. 03:45 – 05:20 ChatGPT Psychosis Case &...
Episode 11 · 19 July 2025 · 30 min
What if the answer to AI in education isn't choosing between human or machine, but discovering how they amplify each other? New research from Procter & Gamble, MIT, and Wharton just shattered everything we thought we knew about human-AI collaboration. Individual professionals working with AI performed just as well as traditional two-person teams—with 37% better results and significantly higher job
Episode 10 · 12 July 2025 · 28 min
If your job involves thinking, explaining, or creating…AI wants a word. In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, we dive into the infinite content machine. how educators and creatives alike can build personalized AI-powered experiences (for better or Franken-worse). But before we Frankenstein our workflows, we unpack a dangerous new AI platform that’s proudly marketing itself as a cheat engine. an
Episode 9 · 5 July 2025 · 29 min
Anthropic got it's Ai to run a business it hallucinated a fake person and tried to fire a supplier. Welcome to Episode 9 of Adjunct Intelligence, where we unpack what happens when AI runs a business and possibly your classroom. This week, we take a hard look at the collapse of “vibe coding,” the rise of context engineering, and a trust crisis that could either break higher education or rebuild it
Episode 8 · 28 June 2025 · 36 min
That MIT Brain Study Everyone’s Sharing? Here’s What It Actually Found The latest MIT study making headlines isn’t telling the whole story about AI and cognitive function. We tested four premium AI models head-to-head to settle the $20 question, and discovered Google’s NotebookLM might be the stewardship breakthrough that changes how students actually learn with AI. AI Innovation Spotlight: Top 3
Episode 7 · 21 June 2025 · 37 min
Google's Secret AI Roadmap: The Classroom Crystal Ball That Changes Everything While education leaders debate AI policies, Google just revealed the future and it's coming faster than anyone expected. Buried in a 10-hour developer presentation was one slide that might be the closest thing we have to a roadmap for AI in education. This isn't theoretical anymore. The tools reshaping how students lear
Episode 6 · 14 June 2025 · 39 min
Welcome to another thought-provoking episode of Adjunct Intelligence! Dale and Nick dive deep into the seismic shifts happening in AI and education this week. From OpenAI's legal woes, to Apple's surprisingly skeptical stance on AI capabilities, we're unpacking the headlines that matter to educators. But the real bombshell? New research reveals that 91% of students worry about breaking university
Episode 5 · 7 June 2025 · 31 min
Welcome to another mind-expanding episode of Adjunct Intelligence! This week, hosts Dale and Nick dive deep into two game-changing AI developments that every educator needs to understand. First, we explore why "taste" - your ability to distinguish quality from algorithmic average - has become your most valuable skill in an AI-saturated world. Then, we uncover how AI is quietly revolutionizing acce
Episode 4 · 31 May 2025 · 34 min
Buckle up for this eye-opening episode of Adjunct Intelligence! Dale and Nick dive deep into the seismic shifts happening in AI and higher education, from Australia's regulatory pivot to the Hollywood-level deepfakes you can now create on your phone. This episode is little less than "ooh shiney new widgets" and more wake up call. 🚨 Big-Ticket AI Headlines Australia Takes the Regulatory Route - TE
Episode 3 · 24 May 2025 · 30 min
Welcome to Episode 3 of Adjunct Intelligence, the podcast navigating the intersection of artificial intelligence and higher education. This week, Dale and Nick unpack a whirlwind of announcements from tech giants, dive deep into the world of AI agents, and explore what happens when humans are no longer at the top of the knowledge food chain. From Microsoft's trillion-dollar AI ambitions to breakth
Episode 2 · 17 May 2025 · 26 min
Welcome to Episode 2 of Adjunct Intelligence the podcast where higher-ed meets high-tech at break-neck speed. This week Dale and Nick tackle a news cycle that rockets from schoolyard chatbots to nation-scale health analytics, dives into GenAi Video and hands you the prompt-writing cheats you’ll need to survive it all. Buckle up, charge your tokens, and let’s roll. 🚀 Big-Ticket AI Headlines Gemini
Episode 1 · 10 May 2025 · 20 min
Everybody is cheating (allegedly), OpenAI for Government and the future of internet it is the third week of may and this is the first episode of Adjunct Intelligence, everything you need to know about Artificial intelligence and its impact on Higher Education. In the news OpenAI just pitched “ChatGPT for Countries,” Alibaba and Google dropped fresh model upgrades, WPP plugged AI straight into its
