UNC embraces artificial intelligence as popularity grows: 'Remarkable'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (WTVD) -- No matter what generation you stepped foot on UNC's campus, the spirit of academia holds true. However, faculty's and students' approaches to age-old questions have changed dramatically with the evolution of artificial intelligence playing a major role in daily functions.

"The thing that comes across, first and foremost, with AI is how excited and enthused everyone is," said Dr. Michael Barker, the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at UNC.

"I've been really encouraged by the number of different kinds of projects that people have had ideas about and just the energy that seems to be emerging around this," added Dr. Andy Lang, the UNC Associate Dean of IT and Data Analytics.

Chancellor Lee Roberts, who discussed AI in remarks during his installation ceremony earlier this month, noted its role in a "rapidly developing world."

An August report from the Digital Educational Council found that 86% of students surveyed used AI regularly in their studies.

"Students are definitely using it," said Mark McNeilly, a Professor of the Practice of Marketing.

McNeilly incorporates artificial intelligence in his classes, even teaching an AI entrepreneurship course.

"There's sort of a saying in the AI world that you're not going to be replaced by AI, but you'll be replaced by someone who knows AI. This is why it's crucial that students have AI skills and that faculty have the skills to impart to the students," said McNeilly.

Job posting analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers found three times higher growth in hiring for positions that require specialized AI skills and 25% potential average wage premium for those roles.

"We need to really make sure that our students have the skills they need to compete in the marketplace. We know from data that people that are hiring are looking for students with AI skills, and so we need to make sure that we have the ability to give them those skills," said McNeilly.

UNC has set up a Generative AI Committee and AI Acceleration Program, tasking officials with a series of tasks and responsibilities when it comes to incorporating AI.

"The fact that it's been so active, so quickly and occupied so many people's minds is really remarkable. But it's still early days. Part of what the programs are doing is casting a wide net so that we can actually get the expertise, the advice of a wider group of people thinking about it, putting their minds to it as to what the appropriate uses are, where you can get the small wins, where you can have bigger opportunities," Barker said.

On the AI Committee, goals include providing recommendations to the provost for funding of fellowships and projects for faculty, staff, students and campus units and increasing its usage. In the AI Acceleration Program, the focus is on providing incentives, including grants and matching funds, to encourage its adoption as part of instruction, research, and other uses.

"I think one of the drivers had to do with democratizing access to AI," said Lang.

Its capabilities include such things as writing code and streamlining research, with AI viewed as a key tool to help further medical advancements.

"Historically in the space of drug discovery, where we may have used traditional methods to test hundreds if not thousands of compounds in a lab, that would have taken years to identify drugs that could be used to treat new illnesses or diseases. With AI, we can now narrow the number of targets that need to go into the lab. Instead of testing hundreds or thousands in the lab, we can test dozens. And that speeds the process to identify new drugs, to treat diseases," Dr. Andy Johns, Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, explained.

Lang further noted its application in the humanities.

"One project that has, that I've been talking with somebody about has to do with the corpus of documents that Saint Thomas Aquinas produced, and to have AI look at that body of work and maybe surface things that haven't been surfaced before. There's also intersections with philosophy and so on," said Lang.

Amidst it all, and part of the Committee's focus, is on establishing guidelines of when it's appropriate to use artificial intelligence, which despite its rapid development, still has limitations.

"Part of what the role of academia is to not just leverage as a tool to do research or whatever the field is, but to do research on AI itself. To make sure that we can understand the models, we can understand how the models are performing, understand the shortcomings of the AI models, and then work to innovate to strengthen those or address those or address those shortcomings so we can get to the point where it can be trusted," said Johns.

Even in tasks it can complete, the ethical debate over its usefulness continues to take hold both on and off campus.

"If I'm writing a letter to my daughter, if I'm writing a letter to about condolences or something like that, it matters that I write it rather than the machine writes it. So it puts us in a circumstance where we have to think about what it is to interact and be human," Barker explained.