It is well known that students are using AI, that some uses undermine their learning, and that bans are difficult and labor-intensive to enforce. To confront this, Lauren Lyons asked students in her Ethics and Technology course to collaboratively build their own AI policy. In this session, Lyons will describe how she structured the activity, share what she learned (including what she would change), and then open a broader conversation about co-creating AI policies across disciplines, both within and beyond the humanities.

Students ultimately chose a relatively restrictive policy, allowing AI for mechanical editing but not for generating ideas or prose. Several takeaways emerged from the work they submitted for the activity, ensuing discussions, and course evaluations. First, the discussion brought the pedagogically relevant reasons to the fore: students evaluated AI use in terms of its effects on their own learning rather than as a matter of compliance. Second, specificity mattered. Distinguishing among different uses (e.g. brainstorming, outlining, generating text, and editing) was necessary for students to understand the impact of AI on learning and articulate a clear policy. Finally, the activity opened a broader conversation about the ethics of AI in education, one students were eager to have and continued throughout the course.

There are a number of questions Lyons hopes to get into in the discussion portion of this session: How might different learning goals across fields shape what appropriate AI use looks like and so how to set bounds on co-creation? What should we do if a chosen AI policy goes against our own pedagogical judgement? How should we enforce AI policies, and how might co-creation help with enforcement? Could this model apply to graduate courses? How can we co-create policy in large lecture courses?

Lauren Lyons is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick in 2024. She works in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and their intersection. She is especially interested in the ethics of policing and punishment. Lyons recently wrote a paper arguing that we should “unbundle” the police, reallocating powers and responsibilities from police to other institutions and reducing the footprint of policing. She is currently working on papers on prison abolition and crime prevention and the structure of functional critique (i.e. prisons function to maintain hierachies). Methodologically, she aims to put ideas emanating from social movements into conversation with analytic ethics and political philosophy.