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Version control: how I combat the rise of generative AI in the classroom

Nikita BezrukovAugust 5, 2025

“I was worried that ChatGPT was composing my students’ essays. Looking at the writing process step by step can combat this and has other benefits, too.”

A colleague suggested that I use a blockchain analogy to explain my reasoning. That framing changed the mood. Most students already knew that blockchain keeps a transparent, tamper‑resistant ledger of changes: each block stores data, such as transactions, and is cryptographically linked to the previous block, forming a continuous, verifiable chain. Any attempt to alter a block stands out immediately, so the record is trustworthy. Seeing version‑tracking tools as a classroom‑scale blockchain made sense to the students — and the requirement suddenly felt intuitive, rather than punitive.

Published as a Career Column at Nature.com.

Tagged asai education pedagogy writing

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Nikita Bezrukov

Nikita Bezrukov spends most of his time puzzling over the architecture of language. With an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, he asks what we actually assemble when we speak. Do we build sentences out of words, or words out of sentences, fitting tiny morphemes into pronounceable units along the way. And could the writing systems we use to capture speech be little more than systematic find and replace operations on our phonological output.

To look for answers, Nikita gathers evidence where language is lived: working with speakers of endangered languages in the Armenian and Georgian highlands, filling notebooks in Istanbul cafés, and talking with diaspora communities over mantı in Watertown. These materials feed his theoretical work on how different layers of linguistic structure interlock. You might also find him at the Museum of Fine Arts studying a hieroglyphic inscription.

At MIT he co-teaches communication intensive courses for engineers and computer scientists, along with classes in linguistics. Before arriving in Cambridge, he taught and conducted research at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Princeton University.

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