Chron FAQ

What is Chron?

Chron is a bot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that uses The Chronicle of Higher Education’s published digital archives to answer your questions about higher ed. It is currently available in beta.

What sorts of questions can Chron answer?

Chron develops its replies from more than 130,000 source articles in The Chronicle’s online archive, so it can answer questions about a wide range of issues related to higher education. You can ask the bot about major trends in higher education, key data on faculty and student issues, or other topics.

Chron cannot answer questions about your subscription or other issues related to your account. For all account-related questions, please contact our customer-service team at 202-466-1032 or email us at help@chronicle.com.

Why did you create Chron?

We were inspired to build Chron for two reasons: One was to better surface our rich archive of content. The other was to find opportunities to experiment with and learn more about artificial intelligence. We wanted to advance our own understanding of AI technologies and see how they could be constructively put into practice.

Who made Chron?

Chron was created by technologists at The Chronicle of Higher Education in consultation with our editorial team. We also collaborated with technologists at Amazon Web Services (AWS), who provided the Large Language Models upon which Chron was built. Chron itself is hosted on AWS servers.

Is Chron going to replace your newsroom?

Certainly not. We don’t believe artificial intelligence is a replacement for the sort of high-quality journalism you’ve come to expect from The Chronicle. Rather, we see Chron as a way to better engage with our readers, to help them find the information they are seeking, and to better serve our award-winning human-powered journalism to our readers.

How do you ensure Chron provides accurate answers?

Chron is trained only on Chronicle-published content and we have instructed Chron not to provide an answer to a question that it can’t directly source. That should limit what are known as “hallucinations,” where an AI bot makes up an answer. However, Chron is still an experiment. It may not be able to answer every question and it can sometimes get things wrong. For that reason, we strongly encourage users to verify the information in Chron’s responses by clicking through to the source articles listed with every answer.

How does Chron balance recency versus relevancy in the articles it chooses?

As with any large language model, there must be an algorithmic balance between having Chron choose the most relevant source material and the most recent source material. Right now, our balance leans toward relevance, context, and comprehensiveness a bit more than simply drawing on the most recent articles. We think that’s the best way to deliver the most pertinent answers to you. But if you decide you want more recent source articles, simply ask Chron to find them by stating the years you’re looking for after it answers your query; for example, ask Chron to “Please give me articles published after 2020” or “Please give me articles published between 2022 and 2025.”

What AI model are you using?

The Chronicle team experimented with several large language models, ultimately selecting Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy, performance, and commitment to ethical principles. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was created with a commitment to ethical AI development. The key ethical principles behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet are transparency and honesty, respect for human values, privacy protection, and fairness and non-discrimination.

Can I provide feedback?

Yes, we want to hear from you. To provide feedback, return to Chron and scroll down to the feedback form. From there, you can tell us what you think.