As students, faculty and administrators across the College grapple with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for academia, a faculty-led committee aims to find a path forward.

The AI Subcommittee of the Committee on Teaching and Classroom Practice (CoCTP) is headed by Professor of Physics Dale Syphers, who also serves as the chair of the CoCTP. In an email to the student body on January 24, Syphers asked interested students to email the subcommittee to share their experiences with AI in academics and visions for the technology’s future at the College.

The subcommittee, which has recently been expanded to 19 members, has also been organizing programming and outreach related to this mission. The board includes other faculty members and advisory representatives from Information Technology (IT), the Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching, Career Exploration and Development, the Library and the Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs.

Syphers believes that including input from many different areas of the College is necessary given AI’s potential for widespread change.

“By tackling AI in the way we are, we are actually linked to all parts of the College, and so we had to expand [the subcommittee] to get there,” Syphers said.

Last semester, the subcommittee focused on introducing faculty to AI through programming, with much of it funded from a $249,300 grant Bowdoin received from the Davis Educational Foundation last year to integrate AI into the curriculum. The subcommittee will continue to prioritize faculty guidance and programming this semester.

“We’re sending more people away to conferences, and we’re going to have a number of talks, and then when the people come back from the conferences, they’re going to run seminars on what they learned,” Syphers said.

Deputy CIO for Digital Innovation Sherri Castanzo, who sits on the subcommittee as an IT representative, highlighted its other efforts—many of which involve other departments and groups on campus. An example of this is helping the Communications Office with the development of an AI website for the College.

This semester, the subcommittee’s work will also focus on increased outreach to students. In addition to Syphers’s email, he said the subcommittee plans to hold various events open to students, including an upcoming panel featuring students and faculty who used AI in courses during the past semester.

“We’re starting to roll out the part where we’re going to involve students,” Syphers said. “We are going to try and start to have resources for students to understand [the future of AI at Bowdoin].”

Daniel Lee ’27, one of the subcommittee’s two student members, approves of the subcommittee’s current student outreach and hopes to see increased student engagement with AI-related topics.

“Outreach is crucial for our work, and it’s important that students are informed and included in discussions about AI at Bowdoin,” Lee wrote in an email to the Orient. “We received so many helpful responses.… Other students’ feedback, besides my own, is always appreciated and taken critically, so that our committee can serve student and faculty interests as best as possible.”

The subcommittee has already received responses to the call for student assistance. Syphers said the topics highlighted in these responses ranged from concerns about the ethics of AI usage and worries about its ecological impact to ways students have used AI in their personal life and ideas about how to incorporate it into academics.

“Some people have used it and said, ‘Wow, there’s a lot you can do with this.’ Some people look at [AI’s] current energy and water usage and aren’t happy and want to have a conversation about what that means and the role of a college that has a commitment to conservation of resources,” Syphers said.

However, despite these concerns, Castanzo emphasized the necessity of the subcommittee’s work on living with and adapting to AI.

“It’s integrated into everything,” Castanzo said. “So I think we just have to come to terms with that and think about how we want to frame its use based on our mission, vision and values.”

Syphers affirmed the need to adapt to AI, referencing the segment in the Offer of the College that invites students to “carry the keys of the world’s library in [their] pocket.”

“Today, some of those keys are AI,” he said.