JCCC Executive Vice President and Provost Mickey McCloud and AI Task Force Chair R.W. Singh discussed the new AI guidelines for the university during an AI Town Hall.

JCCC created the AI task force to help the college determine how best to use AI on campus for faculty, staff and students.

The guidelines created provide an overview of the use of AI on campus.

JCCC supports the responsible and ethical use of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which includes technologies that can create text, images or multimedia.

“So, if you look at our overview, basically, our real position here is that we cannot fear AI,” McCloud said.

Embracing AI means not fearing it, McCloud says, and to do that, guidelines have been created to help students thrive in the new AI environment.

“We know, as we have worked with students, as we have started to work with employers, that one of the things that is an expectation moving forward is that our students actually understand how the tools work and how to work with them.”

Creating ethical guidelines for students is an important part of the AI task force, just as setting standards that are easily attainable is important for students.

“But for us, we need to make sure that we’re not just teaching them how to use it, but how it should be used,” McCloud said. “We have to think about ethical use, we have to think about appropriate citation, teaching students the difference between originally created content that is their work and aggregated content that [has been] scraped down and pulled together [from] other people’s work.”

AI Task Force Chair R.W. Singh reiterated this.

“Students need to generate the ideas on their own,” Singh said.

The faculty guidelines focus on using AI in a way that will not intrude on student privacy.

“We have to think about which tools [we can] use to do the work of the institution that do not endanger student information, because one of the biggest issues that we have as an institution is we’re responsible for personally identifiable information,” McCloud said. “We house a lot of people’s social security numbers, family data, folks who have payment data with us that [connect to] regular bank accounts.”

The AI task force had to make three decisions when developing the guidelines.

“First, we did not want a hard policy at the board level that required us to have to basically rewrite and go back through, and the board would have to vote and think about these things every time a change happened. We wanted to lean more into what was happening at a lot of larger universities, which was to provide guidelines that tied together policies that were already in existence instead of crafting [a] completely new policy.”

An integral part of these founding principles was to ensure they were adaptable to quickly changing times.

“We wanted to make sure that it was fluid enough that it allowed us a way to grow and change as different people in the organization brought forward different ideas,” McCloud said. “Third, we wanted to make sure that once we had these designed, they would allow us to kind of pivot as the space changes because the one thing that we know is the speed of proliferation of different AI tools is picking up very, very quickly.”

JCCC currently supports Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion, NotebookLM and Google Gemini.