As I write my new book, Peak Higher Education, I research a good amount of statistics. Enrollment data, publication numbers, number of colleges and universities over time – all of these feed into the hopper for analysis, reflection, and representation. I thought it would be interesting to see what generative AI made of it. So I came up with a simple experiment and applied it to a range of AI tools. I used the same basic prompt on each one: “Find American higher education enrollment from 2000-2024 and visualize it as a graph.” I didn’t upload or link to data because I wanted to see how generative AI applications are doing with search and retrieval. TL;DR – response were generally disappointing, but ChatGPT came out on top.
