Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly integrated into everyday life with virtually every Google search conducted today coming with AI overviews and access to Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek not being far behind.
Stuart Selber, a professor of English and director of the Program of Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) in the College of Liberal Arts, said academic integrity cases involving AI usage are often “black-and-white” due to representing a blatant cheating attempt.
“We do have people just treating AI like an answering machine, feeding the assignment sheet in and asking for a finished assignment and handing it in,” Selber said.
He said there are various AI usage policies across the different academic colleges and that allows professors to make their own decisions regarding how AI can be used in their classroom.
“I might have a teacher who teaches in the writing program who wants to ban AI, that’s up to them,” Selber said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, myself, because I think we should wrestle with it because we’re trying to prepare you to wrestle with it in the workplace so we need to wrestle with it in the classroom.”
Ibukun Osunbunmi, an assistant research professor in the College of Engineering, said it was important for professors to be transparent with their AI usage policies and believed such discussions would cause a reduction in academic integrity violations.
When advising a colleague about how AI can be used in their course, Osunbunmi said it was important for students to first learn lesson materials without AI before they are given access to it, as a way to assist in solving complex problems.
“I told him one of my mantras that ‘If you cannot do it without AI, there’s no (way) you can verify AI output,’” Osunbunmi, an assessment and instructional support specialist within the Leonhard Center for Enhancement of Engineering Education, said. “I said ‘Now that your students have mastered the fundamentals, now they know that AI can go wrong. They’ll be careful not to use it or, even if they use it, they will check it and they have done it in a safe space where they are being guided.’”
Osunbunmi said he’s currently working on a website resource for Penn State faculty to learn about how AI can be used in their courses. He said there needs to be more accessible resources and frequent discussion on how to effectively use AI in higher education.
“Why there’s some pushback to AI integration is because it’s disrupting how we teach, it’s disrupting how we learn,” Osunbumni said. “Ultimately, it has a lot of potentials for use but the outcome will be based on deliberate, inflectional design and I perceive it’s going to be a collection of people sitting together in a room and having these hardcore conversations.”
Computers line up side to side at the Willard Building on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026 in University Park, Pa.
Mark Morrisson said he and several of his colleagues are currently investigating how to broaden the ways students can leverage AI through a Bachelor of Arts to complement existing Bachelor of Science degrees already being taught in the Colleges of Engineering and Information Science and Technology (IST).
“The engineering one is about how to make AI, how to understand AI, and the IST one is more use apps, things like that, but what we wanted to achieve with a BA was thinking more about ethical, social, cultural implications of emerging technologies,” Morrisson, a professor of English, said. “Liberal art students fit this kind of thinking very, very well and so we wanted something that would draw students … to be thinking more capaciously about how to understand impacts and dynamics of emerging technologies.”
He said Penn State stands to benefit from providing ways to increase AI literacy among students.
“There is a lot of disruption going on right now over AI and there’s the kind of Luddite perspective of ‘Let’s just rewind and not use this,’” Morrisson said. “Well, it’s not possible to do that anymore so instead, whether just uncritically consuming it or hoping it’ll just go away, there’s a middle ground which is understanding it and really thinking it through like we do with all education at Penn State.”
David Fusco said he instructs his students to use AI as a tool to help them rather than a crutch to rely on.
“In the world of technology that most of my students end up going into, people are using AI in their technology-based jobs,” Fusco, an associate teaching professor in the College of Information Science and Technology, said. “From my own personal experience and the courses I teach, I think it’s a disservice to students to not understand how to use AI properly.”
He said he thinks it important that students learn how to effectively use AI due to it becoming an increasingly necessary skill in several industries.
Gregg Rogers, an associate teaching professor of English and PWR’s associate director, said Penn State has a “responsibility” to teach students about AI so they are both provided with a useful skill and inspired to pursue new ways in which the technology can be applied.
He said changes in Penn State’s stances toward AI in recent years is the result of beginning to consider how to overcome its drawbacks — such as hallucinations, where LLMs generate faulty outputs — as well as its potential for misuse.
“None of these problems are going to be solved by not looking at it,” Rogers said. “We are all still learning about this thing which is what we’re supposed to be doing — we’re a university.”
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