With the accelerated advancement of AI, San Diego Mesa College’s Academic Senate has created a task force to decide the college’s best approach towards it.

The Academic Senate is the teacher’s version of a student government that meets twice each month, made up of at least one full-time faculty member from each department. Andrew Hoffman serves as its president.

“It’s not going to disappear, right? It’s here to stay, and it’s used in businesses out in the world beyond our little academic ivory tower,” Hoffman said. “So we don’t want to act like it doesn’t exist. And at the same token, we don’t want to give up, you know, core functions of academia.”

The goal of the task force is to conduct research on what other universities have implemented as policy, find out in what ways AI could benefit or not benefit students’ actual learning and, ultimately, decide what the best way to implement policy is at San Diego Mesa College. That could look like having one universal policy on students use on AI or potentially leaving it up to each department and professor.

The task force, made up of whichever professors choose to be on it we’ll meet for multiple sessions and ultimately recommend actions for the school to take, Hoffman said.

Nothing has come as quickly and so complex as AI when ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022.

“All of a sudden this thing that people have been kind of whispering about in the back of halls of computer science departments was front and center,” Hoffman said.

For students, AI has made it easier to brainstorm ideas for assignments, which many people believe is a good use of it, or sometimes write their papers without any thought, which is frowned upon by many.

There’s still a lot of unknowns about what AI is capable of which makes creating policy on the issue even more difficult. No decision is expected to be reached as a result of the task force until at least the fall semester.