Love AI or hate it – you can’t just avoid it.

AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping legal education.  Some students are using AI to ghostwrite their course papers.  Some faculty are using it to enhance students’ learning.

Whether you want to embrace this technology or are deeply skeptical about it, you can’t afford to ignore it.

Professors’ Dilemmas

Whatever your instincts about students’ use of AI – to prohibit AI, promote it, or something in between – you may face some dilemmas about what to do.

Faculty who prohibit AI may worry they can’t detect its use or that students need to learn about AI (just not in their courses, please).

Faculty who want to teach students how to use AI responsibly may worry about over-reliance on flawed tools, de-skilling, and reduced student engagement.

What Are You Gonna Do About AI?

To help law professors deal with these dilemmas, I wrote Solving Professors’ Dilemmas about Prohibiting or Promoting Student AI Use.

It offers a flexible, pragmatic framework to help you make informed choices to fit with your teaching philosophy, comfort with AI, and students’ needs.  It outlines three basic approaches:

• Prohibiting or restricting AI use
• Promoting responsible, supervised use
• Charting a middle path that combines elements of both

However you approach to AI in your courses, you should communicate your policy explicitly.  Failing to set clear expectations leaves students guessing, undermines your teaching goals, and invites confusion or misconduct.

For faculty who want to restrict or tightly regulate AI use in writing papers, the article offers practical tools to help you do so effectively.  It includes a model AI policy, grading rubric, and a certification form that students can submit with their papers to disclose if and how they used AI.  These forms are designed to set expectations, promote accountability, and let students know that faculty often can detect AI use.  If students submit work that sounds like it was written by a bot, they risk receiving lower grades.

Faculty who want to permit students to use AI tools in writing papers may also find these forms helpful in clarifying expectations.

The article outlines a range of other practical strategies for faculty who want to help students use AI tools effectively and responsibly.  These include using bots as conversation partners in simulations, employing coaching bots to guide students in planning and reflection, and assigning students to submit AI chat transcripts to make their thinking visible.  Faculty can also integrate AI into the writing process, such as for brainstorming, outlining, or editing.

However you respond, you will inevitably have to experiment.  This is new territory.  Faculty, students, and the technology itself are all evolving, often at different speeds.  As you consider how to work with or around AI, you will need time to learn, try different approaches, and adjust.  If you are intrigued but unsure, you can experiment with some techniques next semester and decide what to do after that based on this semester’s experience.  Faculty experiment like this with new teaching methods all the time.

Using a Realistic and Responsible Approach

Some commentators fall into extreme camps, issuing Cassandra-style warnings of apocalypse or painting Pollyanna visions of AI utopia.  But most faculty recognize the picture as more complex.

Whatever your views, many of your students are already using AI, and our graduates will increasingly need to navigate it in practice.  That’s why AI literacy should be a vital goal, even for those most skeptical about the technology.

Indeed, some faculty may set AI literacy as a learning goal in its own right.  They want their students to become skilled in using AI to help them get jobs and prepare them for the realities of modern legal practice.

Helpful Resources

As you develop your syllabi and assignments for next semester, consider how you might deal with AI to promote your teaching goals.

Solving Professors’ Dilemmas can help you develop a smart, workable AI policy without starting from scratch.

Here are some other resources you might find helpful as you prepare for next semester:

• Facing Faculty Fears About AI
• Getting Help from AI to Update Your Syllabus (Even If You Think It’s Just Fine)
• Teaching with AI – and Teaching Students to Use It Well
• Using AI to Promote Student Learning Through Preparation for and Reflection about Simulations
• A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely

Take a look.