Faculty Guide to Generative AI

NOTE: Artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT are developing technologies. This resource addresses a quickly changing field and will continue to be updated as new generative AI resources, research, and ideas are published.

Questions, comments, additions? Go to asklibrary.pace.edu to contact Pace librarians, or email the guide's owner (see the profile on the left side of the page).

Generative artificial intelligence has created major upheavals and promises to create more.The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022 was a seismic event, the long-term effects of which are not yet visible; the short-term effects may have been more noise than substance, but there has been a lot of noise. While ChatGPT is only one of several AI chat products, it seized the attention of a number of fields that could be fundamentally affected by the software, including education.

It's clear that generative AI is a phenomenon that colleges and universities must grapple with. As soon as the tool was publicly available, there were reports of students using ChatGPT to write essays and take exams -- and of professors attempting to ban it, with limited success. In the time since then, the public conversation among educators has shifted to ways that generative AI might be used as a tool to help students do their best work, rather than being policed.

Ethical and pedagogical problems still exist with generative AI, from wide questions about copyright protections and environmental costs to individual instructors' struggles to find time and support to revamp class materials. The ramifications of AI on students' critical thinking skills are not yet clear. What should AI be used for, and not used for, in the context of the college classroom? What restrictions should (and can) we place on its use? How can we help students use this technology when we are still learning how to use it ourselves?

Pace librarians have created this guide to lay out the questions that AI provokes, inform faculty about the uses and pitfalls of generative AI, consider the policies that we should draft to address it, and provide resources for faculty to refer to.

All icons in this guide are from or created with images from Freepik on flaticon.com.

This guide is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International  Reuse and adaptation of these materials is welcome, as long as such use is credited.