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Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning entitled, “Is It Time to Regulate AI Use on Campus?” Written by Lee Gardner, it reviews the issue of whether/how to regulate AI use on our campuses.  It also is a call for colleges and universities to establish policies especially regarding student use of generative AI for writing assignments.  I completely support the need for AI policies but I doubt very much whether we can “regulate” its use.  The genie is out of the bottle and it will be impossible to put it back in.

Below is an excerpt from the article. 

Tony

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“Last fall, instructors at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst suddenly started receiving scores for every student’s writing assignment, estimating how likely it was that they had been completed using generative artificial intelligence. The percentile scores were generated by an AI tool built into the institution’s learning-management system. The scenario, administrators say, caused “massive confusion.” Faculty members might see a high percentile score for an assignment, but how high did a score have to be to justify some kind of action? What if the software’s analysis gave an assignment a 51 percent likelihood of AI use? How does a professor interpret that? And the leapfrogging rate of innovation in AI technology made the university’s own computer scientists skeptical that AI-detection tools were reliable predictors of anything at all.

The tool fueled a discussion already underway at UMass Amherst and many other institutions: the need to create a university-wide generative AI policy. As the technology spreads throughout all aspects of academe — and evolves at a pace measured in months, not years — experts and a burgeoning number of administrators believe that colleges need to establish guidelines about its use or face potential disaster.

What kind of disaster? So far, higher education has been devoid of major public AI scandals. But ungoverned use of the technology across a campus could lead to exposure of sensitive data and the proliferation of inconsistent uses that could potentially harm students and other stakeholders as well as the institution. Confusing or patchy AI policies might be worse than none at all.

The need for comprehensive AI policies is already apparent to colleges’ technology leaders. A survey conducted in the fall of 2023 by Educause, a membership organization for technology professionals in higher education, found that almost a quarter of respondents’ colleges had policies in place to regulate AI use. Nearly half of respondents, however, disagreed or strongly disagreed that their institutions had sufficient existing policies in place.

The biggest use of generative AI at most colleges is in the classroom, and at many colleges, administrators let instructors determine how, or if, the technology can be used in their courses and provide some guidelines.

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