He said the deliberation process held a lot of strong views on AI, saying there were various suggestions “that came down from the top,” such as incorporating an AI assignment into every class syllabus.
“The faculty basically said ‘no,’ because the faculty feel like they’ve got to have control over their own classes,” he said.
“We’re trying to get this balance right, of intentionally adopting [AI] ethically without losing the academic integrity.”
AI is ‘what you make of it’
Since professors must tailor their policies to the needs of their respective subjects, AI is handled in various ways across campus.
McNeilly said he believes that AI impacts are “up to [the individual]” and that it does not replace the need for knowledge about a specific field.
“Prompting is really knowing what questions to ask,” McNeilly said. “So if you don’t know the domain that you’re in, you don’t know what questions to ask, for one, and secondly, you don’t know if the stuff that’s coming back makes sense or not.”
McNeilly said he integrates AI into his classes for roleplaying exercises. He said that at the end of the exercise, the AI model grades students based on a rubric he created.
“This works better than two students roleplaying, because the AI actually has a good way to grade them, whereas students who don’t know anything can’t grade the other one,” he said.
The Provost’s AI Committee conducted a survey of UNC faculty and students. They found that 94 percent of faculty say graduates must learn to use AI effectively, ethically and critically. They also found that 75 percentof faculty feel responsible for teaching ethical AI use.
McNeilly said he doesn’t believe every individual class should require AI, but students should be exposed to the tool at some point in their college career.
Media and Journalism professor Deb Aikat said he thinks UNC needs a formal AI curriculum to prepare students for future jobs, as students should be empowered with AI tools.
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He said there are benefits of using AI tools in class and compared the use of AI for a literature review to using Google Scholar or JSTOR, two resources that are already embedded in academia.
Regarding formal expectations for his classes, Aikat said he respects the University guidelines, but strives to thoughtfully integrate AI into his teaching. He said that the first few assignments he gives are to be done without AI, but he spends a significant part of the semester teaching students how to use the tool ethically.
Aikat also said that professors should learn about AI in depth before teaching it to their students. He said that the Office of Undergraduate Research gave him a grant for a doctoral candidate from the Communications department to help him as a research consultant, and he plans to have her work with him and his students to approach AI thoughtfully.
Student perspectives
In a 2024 survey conducted by the Metrics Subcommittee of the Provost’s AI Committee, 94 percent of undergraduate respondents said that they understood both the benefits and detriments AI can pose to learning.
Dani Colling is a junior who studies Environmental Science. She said her professors present AI as a useful resource for coding required for her major, and she sees it as a valuable tool in quantitative contexts. However, she said that for writing assignments it can be harmful and inaccurate.
She said that her mother is a lawyer and has received briefs written with AI that cite nonexistent cases, so students should understand its shortcomings.
The survey also found that 96.5 of students understand when AI use is appropriate for their coursework, and 94.5 consider their professors’ policies reasonable.
Ashlyn Fortney, a junior studying Health Policy and Management and French, said her French classes permit AI use with proper citations, and she’s found it helpful for contextualizing language parts in a way that Google Translate can’t.
The Metrics Subcommittee’s undergraduate survey shows that students most commonly used AI to brainstorm, research and study. Fortney said that she uses it to search for sources for some of her research.
She also said that efficient AI education should be a top priority for UNC, especially with its reputation as a research school, and she sees potential for standard departmental policies in the future.
“With the different subjects that people are studying, AI usage is just so different that it would be very hard to create a universal rule,” she said.
Jeswin Antony is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Philosophy, Politics and Economics who has seen a range of perspectives on AI. He said that his STEM classes have not addressed AI use very thoroughly, but he has seen stricter policies in his other courses.
“For a lot of my English classes or my policy classes where the writing of briefs, and papers and articles is a large portion of the class, the utilization of AI hinders the actual authentic learning a student can do,” Antony said. “The professors have been trying to crack down on that.”
Ultimately, Antony said he sees AI in the educational setting as the “new frontier” of learning. He said it is an inevitable advancement whose impact will depend on how it is wielded.
“I feel like it’ll probably be something like the calculator, where initially we thought that students would now be lacking in their math skills, but eventually the tool becomes so widespread in use that the baseline level of our performance is now aided by a tool like this,” he said.