CHAMPAIGN — Artificial Intelligence has quickly become a staple in campus life – from generating ideas in classrooms to analyzing data in research labs.
But for many college instructors, the rapid rise in AI prompts more questions than answers.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there’s no single overarching policy for AI. Rather, departments set their own guidelines, and faculty are responsible for making clear how AI can and can’t be used in their classes.
Inside the Siebel Center for Design, students, faculty and staff gather a few times each semester for GenAI Dialogues, a series of open conversation sessions to explore generative AI tools and discuss how they’re using them in everyday work and learning.
Saad Shehab, senior associate director of Assessment and Research at the Siebel Center for Design, said these conversations center on curiosity and experimentation.
“We wanted to create something at SCD that’s available and accessible to all… anyone can participate at any time. They can come, listen to what’s going on, learn something or even present something,” said Shehab.
In the group’s latest session on March 22, the dialogue turned to faculty experiences with AI. Instructors shared how they engage with generative AI in administrative work and in their personal lives.
Mindy Chappell, an assistant professor in the U of I’s College of Education, explained how she approaches AI in the classroom.
“Even though I may not use AI to create my syllabus, I tell students, ‘You can use generative AI for this to brainstorm.’ Now, do I know if they’re using it beyond that? No,” Chappell said. “But that’s part of helping them understand the ethical ways they should be engaging with AI.”
Another panelist, Christy Moss, said her experience as an adjunct lecturer at the School of Information Science as a Ph.D. student gives her a broad perspective on many different ways AI is used across the university.
“I am actively teaching students how to use generative AI in this particular area and field of work,” Moss said. “So I’m encouraging them on how they think with AI and how they use AI, recognizing that as soon as they go into the workforce and get positions like the ones that I’m training them to have, they’re absolutely going to use AI, and they need to know how to use it well.”
Moss is also vice president of membership and marketing for the University of Illinois Alumni Association and said that when her team realized AI was becoming significant, she got a license for an AI tool and began training the team to use it every day in the marketing world.
“There couldn’t be a better tool than generative AI for quickly producing the types of content that we need once we’ve done the work of testing language with our audiences and establishing our style,” she said.
The discussion then shifted from practical uses of AI to its broader implications, and Chappell returned to the conversation to emphasize the costs of AI and potential risks — including concerns about AI’s environmental impact.
“Part of us integrating our individual and our collective responsibility also has to be thinking about these environmental things,” she said. “What does history tell us? That years from now, we’ll be dealing with these huge environmental issues in a retroactive type of way, when we have the capacity right now to be very proactive about it.”
The next GenAI Dialogues session will focus on AI in industry applications at the Siebel Center for Design’s Starlight Café, with a virtual option via Zoom, on April 22 from 3 to 4 p.m.