Faculty Visions of Academic Futures with Generative AI

The advent of widespread and impressively capable artificial intelligence (AI), including GenAI, is fostering massive excitement among policymakers, industry leaders, academic scholars, artists, engineers, students, doctors, and many others. Government bodies such as the European Union are increasingly mandating structures for regulating AI systems and the data used to create them, while other government leaders, such as those in the UK, have spurned regulations, including enforcement of copyright protections, that they fear would reduce their nation's capacity for technical and economic AI leadership. Governments should allocate new resources toward critical exploration and development of GenAI systems and guidelines. Academic institutions are essential, critical enablers of democratic societies. Governments must address not only how GenAI can lead to more efficient societies, but also what types of uses, thinking, and societal trajectories may be detrimentally impeded if we solely follow industry forces.