Courtesy of Eric Chown

The Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, a $50 million initiative funded by Bowdoin alumnus and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, emerged with an ambitious mission: “exploring, understanding and ethically guiding the transformative power of artificial intelligence.”

The initiative’s priorities include hiring ten new faculty members across academic disciplines, funding faculty research and supporting teaching and artistic projects involving artificial intelligence (AI). In recent months, funding

has also become more available to students, expanding opportunities for them to engage directly with the developing technologies.

The Hastings Initiative is particularly relevant within Bowdoin’s growing research culture, with more than 200 students conducting faculty-mentored research annually. In 2025, the College was officially recognized as a Research College and University (RCU)—a notable distinction for a liberal arts college.

Students are encountering AI at a pivotal point in their academic careers, uniquely positioning them to question its morality, capabilities and limitations.

In February, the College released applications for Student AI Grants funded through the Initiative. Awarded twice monthly for amounts up to $1,000, the grants provide supplemental funding for students pursuing research and exploratory projects involving AI. Preference is given to independent studies and honors theses requiring additional funding, but grants also support collaborative projects with faculty, staff or external organizations and experiments with new AI software.

Student research has analyzed not only the technical capabilities of AI but also the ethical implications of emerging technologies and human responses to machine learning.

Subi Kalra ’26 conducted an honors project in economics examining how information about sustainability and AI’s environmental impact affects people’s practices and beliefs surrounding AI. Kalra’s grant allowed her to expand the survey sample to approximately 1,400 participants and collect additional data to inform her study.

Alma Dudas ’27 also explored the intersection of humans and evolving technology, using her funding to meet with more than a dozen professors, PhD candidates and practitioners at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Her research pertained to human-computer interaction, AI ethics, privacy and trust.

“I engaged with current developments while also building the skills to question them critically,” Dudas said. “For me, that is one of the most valuable things Hastings can do: give students the knowledge, confidence and opportunities to feel empowered to engage with a field that is changing incredibly quickly.”

Beyond general research funding, the College introduced the Hastings Summer Fellowship. The inaugural cohort, composed of five students, studied AI under faculty mentorship over an eight-week period this past summer.

Fellows applied their newfound knowledge to innovative projects, spanning from an anti-procrastination app to a publicly-available interface for greenhouse gas emissions to software designed to help preserve personal memories.

Certain AI ethicists have proposed that machines should be used predominantly for mundane, repetitive tasks, such as administrative work or data compilation, allowing humans to devote their efforts to more meaningful creative and artistic pursuits. Despite these efforts to create a more conscious distinction between AI and the humanities, Bowdoin’s student researchers argue that the two are not inherently contradictory.

Camily Guimarães Carvalho ’29, a Hastings Summer Fellow, worked alongside Associate Professor of Economics Martin Abel to expand economics researchers’ access to scholarly articles. She also designed a database of academic and career resources for low-income Brazilian students, using AI to regularly update the opportunities and share newsletters.

Carvalho argued that AI is not a replacement for human connection but can instead meaningfully supplement and facilitate human capabilities. Nevertheless, Sabina Gill ’29 admitted that she was concerned about others interpreting her and Calvin Cecil’s ’28 project as “using AI to take away a human’s creative work.”

Gill and Cecil, both Hastings Fellows, engineered a storytelling software that enables retirees to preserve their lifelong recollections as personal memoirs by simulating interviews and recording transcripts. Gill’s skeptical approach to her work with AI allowed her to remain thoughtful about its application to a creative task and cognizant of machine learning’s shortcomings.

Carvalho also confessed her reluctance to delegate coding to a machine. However, both Gill and Carvalho concurred that refusing to engage with AI altogether is an ignorant approach, especially with the accessibility of Bowdoin’s educational resources and its increasing embeddedness in academia and the workforce.

“I feel like we should definitely use these tools, since they are being institutionalized and [the College] expects us to use them,” Carvalho said. “[You should] only use it when necessary, and also be very educated about how AI affects your learning abilities, society … and what it means for productivity and humanity in general.”

Students reflected on the tension between the ethical temptation to disengage from AI entirely, knowing its possible ramifications for the environment and student learning and Bowdoin’s commitment to the common good.

“I don’t think that AI is morally good or morally bad,” Gill said. “At the end of the day, the output that AI gives us is a reflection of our own human knowledge, and any bias is simply human bias. There are definitely moral and immoral ways to use AI and it is up to [humans] to use it responsibly.”

That responsibility has shaped Gill’s own work. She also utilized AI to create a Chrome extension that analyzes the news articles users read and evaluates their biases before pairing them with a user who holds conflicting beliefs. She hopes to implement the tool in the McKeen Center’s Conversation Fellowship program.

“In terms of ethics, the way I view it is that you have to use the tools that are available to you to do the most good possible,” Carvalho said.