Despite an enthusiastic announcement by California State University management surrounding a first of its kind artificial intelligence platform, faculty are coming out saying they were not consulted and do not necessarily support the top-down directive.

Nearly 150 California Faculty Association members held an organizing and mobilizing conference at San Francisco State last weekend to share opinions and strategies on how to move forward following recent dealings within the CSU. One topic discussed was faculty’s opposition to the CSU’s embrace of artificial intelligence on its 23 campuses.

“We have some real concerns and some real questions,” said Kevin Wehr, a professor at Sacramento State and CFA bargaining chair. “Faculty were really not consulted in this process, nobody asked our opinion … The faculty senate should have been consulted and the union should have been consulted.”

Earlier this month, the system announced it was launching an AI platform for students, staff and faculty designed in partnership with several technology companies and leaders in the AI space. The system is part of the CSU’s push to integrate AI into classrooms.

In its announcement, the CSU said the AI platform will offer research, professional development, and teaching tools, and will be accessible to the entire CSU community free of charge. The CSU is paying $16.9 million over an 18-month term for the platform.

“Any integration and use of A.I. in the classroom must be led by faculty, not by administrators and tech companies,” reads a letter sent out to CFA members. “Faculty should have the power to decide how and whether to use these tools and should not be subject to repercussions for using A.I. in responsible ways, nor for refusing to use it.”

The union has not heard back from management regarding their concerns, but the bargaining team plans to take up the issue during its upcoming round of contract negotiations, said Wehr.

In a statement issued to the Herald from CSU, spokeswoman Amy Bentley-Smith said, “Through the structures being launched as part of the CSU’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy as well as numerous local campus bodies and processes, there is and will be opportunity for input by faculty into the appropriate and intentional adoption of AI technologies.”

One of the main concerns, said Wehr, is how the initiative will impact working conditions.

“I worry about how AI is going to be used to screen resumes, how it could be misused for creating a professor bot, for lack of a better term, how AI could result in job loss for faculty, teaching assistants and even some staff,” he said.

Many faculty are unsure if their intellectual property, including research and teaching materials, could possibly be used to train AI, said Wehr. There’s also a concern over how the initiative and future uses of the platform could affect positions like academic counselors and librarians.

The CSU’s agreement with OpenAI includes language that ensures data privacy and security. User data or ChatGPT interactions will not be used to train underlying large language models or improve services, said Bentley-Smith.

“We’re not clear exactly what the initiative means,” said Meghan O’Donnell, CFA Associate Vice President of Lecturers, North and CSUMB lecturer. “There’s a lot of details that have not been communicated to campus stakeholders.”

While an AI task force developed by the CSU included two faculty members, Wehr said that wasn’t enough to fully understand how the majority of faculty feel about the push to integrate AI into classrooms and other areas of the CSU.

“I think for a lot of the things that come out of the Chancellor’s office, there’s just kind of a lack of consultation, there’s a lack of engagement,” said O’Donnell. “If they had brought stakeholders in from the very beginning … to actually work through the details before pushing this out, this would definitely not be the situation that we’re in, where folks are kind of freaking out.”

Another main topic of conversation at the conference was the union’s concern over potential budget cuts at the state level. In Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed state budget, the CSU is set to experience a nearly 8% base budget cut which O’Donnell said would be a “crisis level” cut.

“There is great concern about several different assaults on public higher education right now,” said Wehr. Also of concern is federal pushback on diversity initiatives, which the CSU tends to pride itself on. It’s still unclear whether the CSU will be forced to conform with the administration’s demands or if it will risk losing funding.

“I think the general sense of why this conference happened is really a sense that, particularly public higher education and public education at large, feels very under attack right now,” said O’Donnell. “There’s chaos coming out of the White House — there’s a lot of political attacks coming out on higher education.

“We just really want to ensure that our leaders in California, both the chancellor and the governor, are not adding to that. There’s enough already that we’re having to navigate.”