With many Florida universities incorporating rapidly evolving AI technologies into learning, recent pushes to regulate AI use show state education officials are now looking to set ground rules.
The Board of Governors’ Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Task Force met last Wednesday. The topic at hand was a rule change that would require every university’s board of trustees to adopt policies on AI use and institutional neutrality.
The rules universities created would need to address three points of interest: if faculty members need to disclose their use of AI, if students need to disclose their use of AI, and how students are permitted to use AI for their coursework.
On Thursday, the BOG convened again and decided to issue a public notice of intent to approve the change. That means the regulation will still need final approval down the line.
The Department of Education will consider approving its own rule next Wednesday. It would require all public colleges to craft policies addressing the AI use of staff and students.
Why now?
The question of why education officials have turned to regulations now still remains. One factor could be the numbers. According to the BOG’s presentation on its proposed regulation, eight schools have created some form of guidance on AI use. Only two, including the University of Florida, have adopted formal policy. There are 12 universities and 28 public colleges in the state.
UF AI experts have their own guesses. Hans van Oostrom is the director of the university’s Artificial Intelligence Academic Initiative Center. It’s more commonly called the AI2 Center, and primarily trains faculty on how to best integrate AI. Van Oostrom himself influences UF’s AI policy through the provost’s office.
He said he thinks lawmakers were bound to get here eventually. “AI is increasing everywhere, so there are certain concerns about that. How do we ensure that students are still learning and making it clear that work was done by the student rather than a tool or AI?” said van Oostrom.
Jasmine McNealy is a professor who studies how technology influences law and policy. She said, “It’s a natural progression as AI is spread across different sectors and its use has ballooned, particularly on university campuses, but in K-12 as well. There has to be some kind of policy to this now ubiquitous technology, right?”
Jane Bambauer is a law professor at UF who previously served as chair of the National AI Advisory Committee Subcommittee on Law Enforcement. She said she feels there’s been a shift in the way people see AI at colleges and universities.
“I think what’s changed is that for a little while we just kind of allowed anything goes experimentation where each professor basically was managing AI rules in their own ways,” Bambauer said. “Without clear terms and rules and enforcement, it’s starting to feel like the wild west.”
Bambauer and McNealy also had thoughts on why the BOG and BOE would require regulations, but not specify how schools craft them. Bambauer said governing bodies usually take a mindset of, “We know something should be done. We don’t know the substance of what the rule should be, so we’re going to say that we’re going to commit to doing something without specifying what that something is.”
Still, she called that valuable. Bambauer said when colleges and universities are forced to create policy, it gives something concrete students and faculty can point to, especially if they need to make a complaint.
To McNealy, the lack of specific instruction is a matter of different contexts. She said, “I would say that the University of Florida and USF are different. They’re both huge universities, but they have a different culture. I think policy has to be reflective of the stakeholders in that space.”
Steering AI use
Even within the University of Florida, opinions differ on what principles need to guide school policy the most. Through the AI2 Center, van Oostrom said he valued not just ethical considerations, but also how AI can be practically applied to different disciplines and how educators can constantly adapt to ever-changing technologies.
The most important word to McNealy was transparency. To her, AI disclosure, responsibility, and accountability are useful to policy in higher education. Bambauer also named transparency as a core tenet.
She said her time on the national subcommittee taught her about what principles were most important. “What we learned was that AI regulation is really about getting back to root questions about fairness and justice and what needs to give if there are two very important goals that conflict,” Bambauer said.
Uneasy feelings
While many students and educators view AI with optimism, Bambauer, von Oostrom and McNealy acknowledged there’s just as much apprehension, and sometimes fear. Recently, with rogue AI agents and grim warnings from AI company researchers making headlines, talk about AI seems to have shifted in the public eye.
Bambauer said, “I think everyone’s a bit scared, but the policy implications are not at all clear. Even if it seems inevitable that we’re going to have [AI] security breaches, that doesn’t mean that hitting pause on American companies will ameliorate them necessarily. It might, but it might not.”
Von Oostrom had his own thoughts on rogue agents. “The question really is how do you deal with that? How do you regulate that?” he said. “We do have to, perhaps, think about and define what we can and cannot do at this point with AI.”
In the realm of education, Bambauer felt people had additional fears. “Students aren’t sure what to major in, but also professors aren’t even sure which skills are going to be the ones that are most relevant five years from now. There’s a lot of anxiety, but not a lot of clarity in terms of what lawmakers can or should do.” she said.
McNealy had a different view. “The framing of some of these issues is as though there’s nothing we can do. We have no power. I think that framing is detrimental to people really using their autonomy. You have the right to petition legislators. You have the right to protest. You have the right to organize to stop some of these things from happening,” she said. “There are issues with artificial intelligence that we can do something about.”