Western Washington University is at a crossroads when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). Ask anyone on campus; faculty and students alike will tell you how controversial AI is.
At a faculty senate meeting on Jan. 26, staff and faculty discussed not only the technological shift in AI but also the ramifications it has for the ethics of learning. Many faculty at Western are still debating whether or not they should integrate AI into their courses.
For Sam Bardsley, a computer science student at Western, AI is primarily a learning tool rather than a convenience.
“I feel most tempted to use AI when I get stuck,” Bardsley said. “It can feel like you are banging your head against the wall.”
Bardsley explains that he often turns to AI platforms like ChatGPT to clarify content after lectures instead of spending hours searching through different textbooks. However, Bardsley still worries about students who overuse AI in their schoolwork.
“The more we rely on a tool that does the work for us, the more likely we are to lose those skills,” Bardsley said. “If we use AI to teach us instead, we still can develop our own abilities.”
This distinction was at the heart of the faculty senate meeting, where members of the Critical AI Literacies Collective urged faculty to focus on the ethical impacts and values rather than enforcement policies alone.
Bardsley says that many professors provide clear AI policies, but they are inconsistent across the different departments and classes, adding to anxiety surrounding academic integrity.
“There’s no real consensus,” Bardsley said. “Even when policies are clear, it can still be confusing.”
Cooper Morgan, a computer science graduate teaching and research assistant at Western, sees some of the effects of this anxiety firsthand. He noticed that students continue to rely on it without clear guidance.
“People learn by using it to do their assignments, whether they're good or bad,” Morgan said.
Morgan thinks students who repeatedly copy and paste AI-generated code are at risk of not understanding how to troubleshoot similar problems later on. However, Morgan also emphasized that AI is already very prevalent in the tech industry, and many students will be expected to know how to use it after they graduate.
“I have an internship as a software engineer, and it has constant usage of AI,” Morgan said. “It’s a valuable tool that students will need to know how to use.”
Writing instruction departments, such as the Hacherl Research and Writing Studio at Western, are facing similar challenges.
Dayna Patterson, assistant head of the studio, said that usage has declined significantly since 2020, attributing it to both the pandemic’s remote learning model and the expanded access to AI.
“We sometimes see writing that sounds AI-generated,” Patterson said. “It can sound and feel hollow.”
Patterson worries that students may lose key literacy skills when relying on AI for drafting, especially the process of discovering what they’re writing about through revision processes.
“You discover what you're thinking, and that’s the most magical thing,” said Patterson. “If we rely on generative AI to do too much of the drafting for us, I feel like we lose some of that magic.”
Rather than focusing on policing students, Patterson leads the writing studio in focusing on helping students develop their own voice and support their learning. Staff in the library are also discussing how to teach AI literacy, since more and more databases are incorporating Gen AI tools that students aren’t able to opt out of.
Morgan compares this moment in time for learning to the early days of calculators being integrated into math classrooms.
“Schools originally said you can't use calculators since you would lose your critical math skills,” Morgan said. “It took a while for them to catch up, and it seems like Western is in the early stages of that.”
As AI becomes harder to isolate from academic life, students are left with a choice to separate the convenience of using AI from using it as a learning tool.
Faculty is faced with a similar choice: teach students how to use AI without losing critical literacy skills or ignore the rise of these platforms altogether.
Cody Sauter is a third year at Western studying PR and journalism. As a reporter for The Front, he writes for campus news. When he's not working, he enjoys reading, dancing with Western's SINI-HHA and watching movies with friends. You can reach him at codysauter.thefront@gmail.com.
