Creating Guidelines for the Use of Gen AI Across Campus
CT: How did you drill down to exactly who needed to be on the task force?
Conatser: That's a good question, because we're a big institution. There are a couple of layers to it. Number one is working with the leadership across the university in a way that embraces our shared governance. We worked with our faculty senate to make sure that we had leadership from that body represented on UK ADVANCE; we worked with our leadership in the colleges to identify the experts on this, whether they're a computer scientist who does work in large language models in our College of Engineering, or somebody who works in digital writing studies who thinks about automated writing and electronic environments. We also combed through our own database of publications and research through our research office to make sure that we have a full sense of who's doing work that touches artificial intelligence. And when we first launched the ADVANCE team, we very publicly had an e-mail address to be in dialogue with folks who would write in and say, "I think so-and-so would be a great addition to the team," or "I'm actually really interested in being a part of this." We would discuss every e-mail as a team, any folks that contacted us, and say, "We think that this person would really represent a critical area of stakeholders at the university that maybe isn't on the team yet."
The size of the ADVANCE team reflects this inclusivity to the point that we are unusually large as a university-level task force. We have over 30 people associated with this team. And that means our meetings are really interesting, because we're getting input from people with a lot of different experiences. Our meetings happen every two weeks over Zoom, and the spirit of the group is that it's an open forum. We have certain agenda items, but we always have time for people to bring up issues that we might need to think about, whether it's resources or training or new developments in AI.
CT: How does the work get done in such a large group? What is the structure like?
Conatser: Depending on the project, we'll identify a small number of people to serve as the leads. That tends to fall along the lines of both academic and institutional expertise. For example, for writing the instructional guidelines, I was one of the primaries on that one because I direct our teaching and learning center. For the research guidelines, I worked with the executive director of our Office of Research Integrity, because that's her provenance here at UK. And we're currently working with a couple of the chief information officers in our UK Healthcare system to work with the clinical care guidelines.
The leads will take ideas and input as we iterate on the drafts of these guidelines, and will keep circulating new drafts among the whole team, get more feedback in that loop, and then iterate some more. Once we get to a point as a team where we're comfortable to start shopping it out, we'll send a draft of the guidelines to different areas. We don't publish it yet — we want to make sure that all our stakeholders get input. So for example, our college leadership will send it to our faculty senate, we'll send it to our Legal office, we'll send it anywhere that would have some useful feedback. We want to be transparent and inclusive, so it's not a top-down kind of thing, but rather the product of a large, representative, transdisciplinary body that's gone through a lot of iterations already.
CT: How did you break down the key areas that the guidelines should cover?
Conatser: One of the first conversations that we had as the ADVANCE team, and one that we have on a regular basis, is that these guidelines are specifically addressing generative AI. Whenever we start sliding into other language like AI and machine learning, we start to talk about a broader category of technologies that researchers, healthcare systems, healthcare providers, etc. have been using for a long time to do the work that they do. Trying to come in and write guidelines around that becomes a very different scenario. So we've been very specific that ADVANCE is focusing on generative AI guidance, and we are careful to define what that is in our guidelines so that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about.