From Chronicle of Higher Education
AI Assistants Keep Joining Meetings. Administrators Say It’s Out of Control.
By Taylor Swaak
At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.
One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account...
Privacy and security aren’t the only considerations, though, said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information. When every interaction is recorded, she said, there’s a risk of stifling academic discourse — a valued tenet of higher education.
“What does research, teaching, and learning depend upon? It depends upon people feeling free to express themselves, free to explore new ideas, free to take chances, free to make mistakes...”
Deirdre Mulligan is a professor at the I School focusing on legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems. She joined the White House as deputy United States chief technology officer for policy in early 2023 and recently returned to teaching.
