Allegheny’s AI Task Force released its preliminary report to the college community via email on Sept. 25. The task force was created in June 2025 with the purpose of detailing the possibilities of artificial intelligence usage and its possible effects at the college.

Provost and Dean of Faculty Jennifer Dearden co-chaired the task force alongside Chief Information Officer Katrina Yeung. The goal of the report is to provide a framework that will be used to develop permanent AI policy for Allegheny.

“It’s not just an academic concern, it’s not just a financial concern, it’s not just an environmental concern, it’s everything,” Dearden said of AI.

Dearden played a crucial role for the AI task force, working alongside other faculty members from a wide range of departments, as well as students, to represent the different voices of Allegheny.
Late last summer, the task force went on what Dearden described as a “roadshow.” The group visited many different stakeholders, including the president’s cabinet, faculty council, the Allegheny Student Government and other constituencies to garner input for the report.

The task force’s report includes a summary of findings from this assessment phase, along with a list of prioritizable recommendations, a framework for evaluating and adopting AI policies and a timeline for implementation.

The report contains a glossary of relevant words and terms with definitions to assist readers in understanding the report.

Because these AIs are programs trained on datasets that are fed into the program, different generative AIs have different types of data that can make certain AI more specialized for certain tasks.
“(This year) we’re going to pilot the hybrid model that we propose in this report,” Dearden said. “It won’t be part of our permanent structure, it won’t be in our faculty handbook.”

This pilot year will address many of the concerns raised about AI, including the place of AI in the honor code, ethical considerations and environmental concerns.

“It’s important for us to reconcile how we are going to interact with AI,” Dearden said. “The comprehensive nature of it and its evolving nature are really the hardest parts (to deal with).”

For instance, starting in 2018 with ChatGPT-1, there has been an exponential growth in releases of ChatGPT models, landing at the most recent release of ChatGPT-5 this summer. The models have also been growing better and better, now being able to provide answers to intricate questions or generate more complex essays. Such improvements have the potential to unethically create work that students should be doing themselves and assist students with questions or studying.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” Yeung said. “I don’t think there’s a path where we prevent it or stop it, just because of its prevalence.”

The main question is how AI will be harnessed appropriately for the benefit of all students at Allegheny rather than outright banning AIs, which Yeung says is possible.

“Could I ban a ChatGPT or a Gemini on the campus network?” Yeung said. “Yes, of course I could. But you can easily go home or on a non-campus network and access it or from your phone.”

The report advocates for the adoption of “AI Assessment Scale (AIAS)” to describe how AI could be used in different scenarios. The scale ranges from no AI assistance to idea generation or assisted editing to full AI use.

Janyl Jumadinova, chair of the department of computer and information science, gave her expertise as a panelist in live discussions last semester for the report.

“I think when we have shiny new things, (people) forget about the implications,” Jumadinova said. “Just understanding in general how these models work helps to use these technologies better.”

Understanding the implications of AI usage is similar to any other tool; having knowledge of the positives and negatives helps to learn when to utilize AI.

Even if people aren’t learning in about the coding behind the technology, the terminology matters as well. “Everyone says AI when they mean a large language model, for example,” Jumandinova said.
While not every student may have the interest in learning a lot about AI, it is seemingly here to stay.

“I think we are taking the right steps,” Jumadinova said. “We all hopefully now understand that this technology is here to stay, and it’s already adopted in most of the industries.”

This view that AI has already become widely accepted in industries after college is shared by Yeung as well.

“When students go out into the workforce,” Yeung said, “(they’re) going to need to know how to leverage that and make yourself as impactful to your future employers as possible.”

Both Yeung and Dearden understand the challenges of keeping up with these rapidly developing technologies and invite students to share their thoughts on how Allegheny should handle its AI policy.

“Everyone can bring their own perspective into how we go forward as a college. That’s going to be happening in November” said Dearden. “We have yet to set the formal agenda for that meeting, but in general, we will be focusing on what is the more permanent structure for governance of artificial intelligence on campus.”