CHAPEL HILL (October 23, 2024) – We all wonder how artificial intelligence will affect our lives.
UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts wonders how it will affect the life of the university.
Of four working groups Roberts appointed as interim chancellor last spring, the report from the working group on Generative AI is necessarily the most vague. Who knows where this is all headed?
Most of the recommendations are about strategic positioning and cross-disciplinary collaboration. But Carolina was already involved in the AI conversation before Roberts arrived. The report also recognizes societal and moral issues that AI will undoubtedly pose, as well as hesitance from faculty, staff and students to embrace the technology.1
In our interview with Roberts, he divides the impacts of AI into two buckets:
- Research: “We’re a leading global R1 university. This is the most important technological development in our careers. We need to have a coherent research strategy around this exciting new technology,” he says in the accompanying video. That will be guided by Penny Gordon-Larsen, Vice Chancellor for Research.
- Operations: “How do we use AI here on campus to make things work better? We have a very large, very complex, highly decentralized organization. It’s tailor-made in many ways for many of the exciting AI applications that we’re seeing emerge,” Roberts says.
In a recent meeting with university employees that included housekeepers and campus police, he says, “They all burst forth with exciting, thoughtful, useful suggestions about how AI could make their jobs more effective, make what they do more efficient and easier. So there are applications everywhere you look when you think about our internal operations.”
How will that look? We’re all eager to see.
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