University establishes artificial intelligence committee amid rise in usage

As higher education institutions across the country make decisions about generative artificial intelligence use in the classroom, UNC faculty, staff and students are navigating the impacts on campus.

On Sept. 19, the University announced the new Provost’s AI Committee and the AI Acceleration Program which have goals that include increasing AI usage and literacy on campus, providing simpler AI usage guidance and supporting AI research.

“The philosophy at UNC is AI should help you think, not think for you, and so that is something we’re going to continue to drive,” Mark McNeilly, chair of the Provost’s AI Committee, said.

McNeilly, who is also a professor of the practice of marketing in the Kenan-Flagler Business School and allows AI use for some assignments, said predictive AI has existed for a while, but that generative AI replicates humans much more.

Since its launch in November 2022, Open AI’s platform ChatGPT has dominated the public’s access to generative AI. Professors at UNC have made a variety of different decisions based on its popularization in recent semesters including banning AI, encouraging use or requiring AI statements.

Hanqi Xiao, a UNC junior and president of AI@UNC, said in his experience, professors who have tried to ban AI are usually not successful because online AI checkers do not work. After attending two Provost’s AI Committee meetings this semester, he said the professors involved take on this part-time position to help the University and the projects lack sufficient funding.

“The impression I get is that the University is clearly committing somewhat to basically helping AI become a better part of the university scenario,” Xiao said. “But unfortunately, it seems like the process is very slow.”

The AI Acceleration Program has five subcommittees: metrics, initiatives, proposal approval, communications and usage guidance. Andy Lang, associate dean of information and data analytics and an AI Acceleration Program officer, is on the proposal approval subcommittee which is developing rubrics for evaluating research proposals.

“It’s been really exciting to see all of the interest and energy from across campus in this whole initiative and just the kinds of projects that people are thinking about,” Lang said.

Thomas Bland, a part-time student and vice president of AI@UNC, said there is an issue with professors assigning written work in large lecture-style courses with no intention of personally reviewing the students’ effort.

With ChatGPT being widely used to cheat in school, he said education needs to be reworked to prioritize learning in a more intimate context.

“The fact that a model that is essentially an aggregate of human text on the internet is sufficient to cheat on the systems of our education is not a problem with the model, but a problem with our system of education,” Bland said.

He said AI@UNC, which supports 300 active members who work on a range of projects related to AI, is a part of the solution by offering a more application-based learning experience for students interested in computer science.

Gabriel Bump, an associate professor teaching creative writing courses, said he does not allow students to use AI when writing stories for his class. Bump said he added the AI usage policy shared by the University to his syllabi and does not explicitly say when the platforms can be used.

“I guess the assumption is that students are in all the classes they’re taking because they want to actually do the work, and so I don’t know,” Bump said. “I think that we’re all trying to come to terms with what this new technology means for our fields.”

Bump said he is not aware of students using AI on his writing assignments and isn’t sure if he could notice a student using ChatGPT to write one or two pages of a story. As a novelist, he said he does not know what generative AI means for his livelihood, but he thinks that the arts always persevere.

Tim McGuire, a senior information scientist with UNC Research Computing and an AI Acceleration Program officer, said the committee has focused on the ethics of AI. 

McGuire, who is also a graduate student at UNC, said students have to be mindful of not leaning on AI too much.

“I’m a born and raised North Carolinian, I love North Carolina, I love UNC, and I think we as citizens depend on institutions like UNC to look out for us,” he said. “For the technology and how to apply it in their disciplines, but also how it affects us societally, and what rules and concerns we ought to bring up.”

Beyond knowing AI skills, McNeilly said students will have to be very resilient as AI shapes society and leads to fast change.

“I guess it’s like any new, really groundbreaking technology,” Bump said. “We’re all just trying to keep up with it in some way.”

University Desk Editor Ananya Cox contributed reporting to this story.

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