Given that Laurentian University doesn’t currently have any policies on the emerging technology of artificial intelligence (or AI), the university’s senate voted this week to establish an ad hoc committee on the issue.
This ad hoc committee, to feature representations from faculty, librarians, and Laurentian’s chief information officer, will bring forward policy recommendations regarding the use of AI at Laurentian by December.
The committee will be chaired by Bettina Brockerhoff-Macdonald, director of Laurentian University’s Centre for Teaching and Continuing Learning.
The rationale provided as part of a motion put forward during the Sept. 19 senate meeting to create the committee said Brockerhoff-Macdonald had not only agreed to chair the committee “but has also spent time over the summer researching this matter.”
“The proposed deadline appears reasonable, even taking into account the time to form the committee, not only because of the Chair’s expertise but because many Canadian and foreign universities have already taken positions on AI,” the rationale for the motion continued.
See: Nipissing University's Generative AI Guide for Students
The motion was brought forward by senate member Ernst Gerhardt, a professor of English at Laurentian University.
However, he said the research for the motion was done by Ashley Thomson, librarian emeritus with the university, who was chairing this week’s senate meeting.
In a rather tongue-in-cheek situation, a rationale for the establishment of the ad hoc committee generated by AI technology ChatGPT was also included in the senate information package.
The motion to establish the committee on AI arose from a vigorous discussion at the June Laurentian senate meeting sparked by information provided by senate member Pedro Jugo, director of the Harquail School of Earth Sciences.
Jugo said in June it seems that there are two camps — that AI should be incorporated into learning, or that the tools should be banned entirely.
“And at Laurentian, we’re not even having that conversation,” he said.
Tammy Eger, Laurentian’s vice-president of research, said in June she falls “more in the camp if we don't think that it's not already been used — and these are just a few of the tools — we're all not really up on the process,” she said. “So we do need to find a way to support faculty, students and staff with the use of AI going forward.”
Senate member Ernst Gerhardt said in June that in writing-intensive programs such as the English program, where he is a professor, “we've discovered that students use AI tools a lot to generate text. And it is not always easy to detect in some ways, and it's very difficult to demonstrate that students have in fact used it.”
He said he supports the creation of a committee on the issue, as “we're playing catch up already, I think.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s associate content editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
