College Announces New AI Tools For Student and Staff

On Jan. 21, students received an email from Chief Information Officer David Hamilton announcing that the college has introduced new artificial intelligence (AI) tools for faculty, staff, and students.

The tools include the general-purpose chatbot Gemini App, the research and note-taking model NotebookLM, and the Zoom AI Companion for Meetings, which provides tasks such as meeting note-taking, question proposal generation, and meeting summary generation.

Hamilton began the initiative over the past summer and made a formal recommendation to the college at the start of the academic year. Hamilton said the project was motivated by privacy and safety concerns around free AI resources commonly used by students and faculty. 

“We knew from national data and from college data that free versions of these tools were being widely used by faculty, staff, and students, and we were very concerned with the risks the use of the free offerings represented,” Hamilton wrote in an email to the Student.

As AI has become increasingly prevalent among college students, Hamilton noted that equity issues around paid AI tools have arisen. “Some are choosing to pay for tools, but for some, that's a much harder choice to make,” he said. “We wanted to be sure we have a level playing field for everyone with respect to access to a set of baseline tools.” 

The recommendation was then reviewed by the Faculty Computer Committee, the Committee on Educational Priorities, the Faculty Executive Committee, the “Task Force on Guidelines for the Use of Generative AI Tools for Teaching and Learning at Amherst”, and senior administration. Hamilton then determined which AI tools to make available based on feedback from these groups, a technical assessment, budgetary impact, as well as national and local surveys. After three to four months of evaluation during last semester, the college made the tools available for students and faculty by the spring semester.

In his campus-wide email, Hamilton cited a report by the American Association of University Professors as one of the resources used to refine the policy around these tools. “It represents an effort to begin to come to an understanding of the concern about the impact the availability of these tools is having on teaching and learning,” Hamilton wrote.

The decision drew a variety of responses from students and faculty. “As with most decisions like this that impact all members of the community, the feedback is all over the map, from those dismayed by the decision to those that are very happy about it,” Hamilton said.