UNC-CH’s Chancellor Thinks There’s an AI Bubble. Why It’s Still a Top Priority.

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts believes “the AI bubble will burst.” 

“But that doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t here to stay,” Roberts told the crowd at The Assembly’s Newsmakers event on Monday.

Roberts, who lists artificial intelligence as one of his key priorities at the state’s flagship university, said he thinks there’s a tendency to overestimate the short-term impacts of new technology. On the other hand, the long-term impacts of technological advances are often underestimated, Roberts said.

The conundrum is illustrated through the massive, multibillion dollar investments companies like Meta and Google have funneled toward AI in the few years since the technology went mainstream. Meanwhile, the gap between spending on AI and the revenue it generates is widening, per The Wall Street Journal.

UNC-CH, which has an annual budget of about $4.5 billion, can’t compete with that level of spending on AI, Roberts acknowledged. Nor can it compete with the computing power of major tech companies, something universities have historically prided themselves on, he said, which will require a “mindset shift.”

But he predicted AI “will reshape just about everything we do” at the university and when students leave to start their careers. He spoke from experience, recounting his time as a summer law associate, which coincided with the advent of online legal research services like LexisNexis. As the youngest people in the office, Roberts said, he and his fellow associates were often called upon to teach their older colleagues about the technology—and were expected to work faster because they knew how to use it.

“I think that’s very close to what’s happening now,” Roberts said.

“We need to organize ourselves to take advantage of this very rapid change, while recognizing that things are evolving quickly,” he said, adding that “the challenge for those of us in leadership positions is to make sure we’re harnessing that appropriately, in a directed way.”

Some of that vision is already taking shape. As part of a newly announced merger of the university’s School of Information and Library Science and School of Data Science and Society, former SILS Dean Jeffrey Bardzell is now serving as the university’s first vice provost for artificial intelligence and chief AI officer.

Bardzell said that higher education’s hallmark pursuit of knowledge, which can often move slowly and take years for “incremental” scientific discoveries to unfold, could be at odds with the quick pace at which AI technologies are being developed and beginning to change society. But he said the disconnect could also give higher education an advantage.

“I think a role of higher education is to do a better job of distinguishing between the shiny objects that are dominating the headlines and the deep things underneath that really are changing and really are enduring,” Bardzell said at Monday’s event, which came at the conclusion of his first day on the new job.

As chief AI officer, much of Bardzell’s work will focus on coordinating the use of AI, and the standards for doing so, across classrooms, labs, and the university’s business operations. But “teaching and learning is initially the highest priority,” he said.

“I do think there is an urgent need to make sure that we are doing our job to prepare the future workforce,” Bardzell said.

The university libraries, led by Vice Provost María Estorino, have been working for nearly two years to understand how students, professors, and staff are using AI and how the libraries can continue to “democratize access to knowledge and the tools used to create it” in the context of the new technology. As an overarching principle, Estorino said, UNC-CH libraries staff now view AI as a “cultural technology”—much like the advent of personal computers.

The libraries’ work so far has largely involved building “literacy” skills for AI, Estorino said. For instance, faculty might invite librarians to teach their class about AI, or librarians might host workshops, like the recent “AI for Skeptics.”

“We don’t serve any one department, we serve them all, and our engagement with technology, historically, really makes us this important nexus in this work,” Estorino said, “because we are going to work to meet people where they are and to diminish the barriers to access to those technologies.”

The libraries are also confronting how AI impacts their own work. At one point, a university catalog was down for a couple of weeks after it was “attacked by bots looking to scrape our catalogs for content to train machines,” Estorino said. She and her staff have also seen AI create “false citations of our collection.” 

“We’ve had several instances of researchers coming to us with a citation that just does not exist in our collections, that AI generated,” she said.

Regarding students’ use of AI, Estorino said she thinks the group wants more guidance on acceptable use and how they will be evaluated if they choose to use the technology for assignments.

“We hear from students that they are choosing not to use AI, just in case that’s going to count as some sort of cheating or violation of the student code,” she said. “There’s a little bit of lack of clarity for them when it’s not spelled out explicitly in their syllabi or by their professor.”

Faculty need clarity, too. Bardzell, responding to a question about how the university might equip professors to detect fabricated data or other work, said it can be difficult to detect whether something was written by AI. He suggested the answer might lie in raising standards for student work, or moving to a more “portfolio-based evaluation” rather than traditional testing.

“I think that the deceptive use of AI is something that’s totally unacceptable, and I think we need to communicate that,” Bardzell said. “I also think we need to communicate the processes by which we produce knowledge.”

Even amid the increased focus on AI, Roberts said it shouldn’t be construed as the university’s guiding principle, as a national outlet recently described the chancellor’s push on the technology.

“I describe our North Star as our mission and service to the people of North Carolina,” Roberts said.

The university is looking to enroll more students and expand its offerings in engineering amid a shortage of engineers in the state and nationally—topics Roberts also addressed Monday.

The university hasn’t articulated a plan for how it will establish an engineering school. The state legislature considered a bill to require UNC-CH to start its own program, though it didn’t become law, and the university looked into buying an existing school in Michigan but dropped the idea. Roberts said any engineering school at UNC-CH won’t seek to compete with other “strong” engineering schools at N.C. State and other in-state universities. Instead, UNC-CH will focus on expanding existing programs in biomedical and environmental engineering, data science, and applied physical sciences, and “add to them over time.”

To accommodate the expanded programs and the additional 5,000 students the university wants to enroll over the next decade, Roberts said leaders will look to Carolina North—the largely undeveloped tract of land that the university has long wanted to make a mixed-use space—to house it. Projects at the site could include classroom and lab space, housing, and athletic facilities, per the university.

“I believe we have an obligation as the state grows, as part of our mission to serve the state, to try to grow as effectively as we can,” Roberts said.