Just Released: Report of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use by Chris Peterson SM '13

In January, MIT launched the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training.

Today, President Kornbluth announced the final report of the committee. I have been spending my morning reading (and listening) to it, and I think it is one of the most important reports about MIT and its education in many years.

In her announcement, President Kornbluth wrote:

As the report makes clear, MIT was founded to help human beings develop their own powers of discovery, problem solving, and invention. That is still and will always be our essential work.

Against that backdrop, AI presents itself to us as a kind of superpower, with both extraordinary potential and disturbing risks. Our challenge now is to derive its benefits and counteract its harms, as we strive “to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.”

…But far and away the most important work will be cultural. As a community, we need to arrive at a shared understanding of the proper role of AI in education at MIT and in our life together on campus, along with shared norms and values around what we can properly do with these new tools, and what we should expect from and owe to one another.

MIT has deep ties to the birth and development of AI and – through our researchers and our graduates – to its future evolution. We therefore have a duty to prepare our students to know when and how to use AI effectively, wisely, ethically, and responsibly, and when not to use it at all. And we need to equip them to apply these formative personal lessons in whatever work they choose to do in the world.

…MIT is and must always be a place that activates the human mind and spirit and that unites creative people in fulfilling the Institute’s great mission. As we define the Institute’s next chapter, AI will test our commitment to that educational ideal. For the sake of our students, for the future of MIT and for the shape of our sector and our society, it’s imperative that we get this right.

I encourage anyone interested in MIT and our education to read it —  whether you are a prospective student/parent, an alum, or an teacher here or elsewhere. It shows the best of MIT’s reports: thoughtful, deliberative, and deep, rooted in institutional history while looking forward to the world as we find it.

I haven’t blogged much about AI, not because I don’t have thoughts, but because I haven’t been sure what to say. The technology has been changing rapidly. Many MIT alumni —  people I personally know, in some cases since they were in high school —  are involved on all conceivable sides of the debate and at every level of the sociotechnical stack. I’ve experimented with student AI use —  and student AI prohibition —  in my teaching in CMS/W. We’ve committed to not using generative AI on the blogs, and we have no plans to adopt it⁠01 Indeed, under MIT’s current <a href="https://infoprotect.mit.edu/">information protection policies</a>, we would not be permitted to do so. in other parts of our admissions reading or selection apparatus. At the same time, I have used LLMs to help me with orphaned coding projects,⁠02 Like the longstanding goal of being able to subscribe to the blogs via RSS -> newsletter a la Substack, god willing one day I will defeat you. or to find typos or informational inconsistencies across 20+ years of posts.

In many blog posts over the years, I (and others) have talked about the idea of following compasses over maps in conditions of uncertainty. When you don’t know the destination or the route, you have to steer by fixed points: the principles and philosophies that are important to you as an individual and as an institution.

I am grateful that today President Kornbluth, and this report, articulated some of those fixed points on behalf of MIT: that the Institute exists “of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.”

In the comments below, I’ll share some of my favorite excerpts from the report as I work through it, and I invite any readers to join me in the exercise. Together, in community, we can make meaning together, pointing towards the star we collectively pursue amidst the gathering clouds.