AI at Carroll – Mission Statement

Faculty and Student Mission Statement

Empowering Carroll Community College faculty and students in the ethical and responsible use of AI. 

Carroll Community College is an institution of higher learning offering both credit and non-credit courses covering a wide variety of disciplines and applications. The college recognizes that the use and acceptance of AI will vary depending upon an individual course, and as a result, faculty, both credit and non-credit, have at their discretion a choice in the use of AI in their courses. Faculty have the discretion not to allow the use of AI if that use comes into conflict with any of the course objectives, especially those dealing skills linked to originality, creativity, and critical thinking.  

The college also recognizes that AI is a rapidly evolving technology, and that higher education, industry, and various professions are still learning and developing practical applications of the technology even as the technology itself is rapidly evolving. In addition, the college acknowledges that the current iteration of AI possesses biases in language, data, and algorithms. 

Classroom Use Guidelines 

The following classroom use guidelines on the use of AI are based on the core values of transparency, trust, ethics, bias mitigation, and data privacy. At the same time, all use by faculty and students must ultimately follow the College’s AI Use Policies. 

Faculty 

• Faculty have a responsibility to review all their AI generated material to check for accuracy and to mitigate bias. 
• Faculty must take steps to protect privacy by not uploading any PII (Personal Identifiable Information) or proprietary information to any AI generator or AI detection software. 
• On campus and on college computers and laptops, faculty must use only college approved AI systems. 
• Faculty has the responsibility to guide students in the ethical use of AI as appropriate to their discipline. 
• Acknowledging potential bias of AI systems, faculty is responsible for reviewing any AI generated material for explicit and implicit bias, editing accordingly. 
• Faculty must include a statement on each assignment on whether AI use is acceptable (along with parameters) or prohibited. 
• Disciplines should develop AI use statements that are reviewed and approved by either the department or division chair.  

Students 

• Students must follow assignment guidelines including not using AI unless faculty specifies they may. 
• Students must disclose when and how they use AI if/when faculty allow it and according to the assignment guidelines. 
• Students have a responsibility to review all their AI generated material (when the use is allowed by faculty) to check for accuracy and to mitigate bias. 
• Students must take steps to protect privacy by not uploading any PII or proprietary information to any AI generator or AI detection software. 
• On campus and on college computers and laptops, students must use only college approved AI systems.  
• Students have the responsibility to learn, with guidance from faculty, about ethical AI use as it relates to their chosen field. 

Legality of AI Use in the Classroom 

The laws have not caught up to the use of AI, including those regarding copyright. At the time of this writing (August 2024), the U.S. Copyright Office’s official position is that non-human creators cannot be authors. The first of the U.S. Copyright Office’s reports have been published:  Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Part 1 

AI systems draw from large databases, and the queries put forth in these systems generate content that faculty and students must consider public. Some AI writing generators state that the user who had AI generate the material owns the copyright, but it is the college’s stance that since the material was not created by an individual person, it is not that person’s work. Exceptions are made when faculty choose to create an assignment that makes use of AI systems; therefore, faculty will guide students in the ethical use of AI for that assignment. 

These are some guiding principles faculty and students need to adhere to: 

• Based on the U.S. Copyright Office’s current stance, faculty and students must assume that any AI generated writing is in the public domain; therefore, faculty or students who generated writing through AI do not own copyright of the AI generated material (Note: Works in the public domain must still be cited.). 
• Students must disclose when and how they have used AI generated writing, and when appropriate, cite the use using the current practices as advised by the American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), or the citation method used by faculty in a course. 
• Faculty and students must not upload any form of PII or proprietary information to any AI platform or AI detection system. 
• CCC’s Library offers a guide called Artificial Intelligence for Students with links to resources.