Policy on Faculty and Staff Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Purpose

Wilmington University is dedicated to advancing knowledge and learning and embraces Generative Artificial Intelligence (“GenAI”) tools. The landscape of GenAI is rapidly changing, and will change the way we teach, learn, and work. We encourage you to explore and experiment with these tools. While the University supports the responsible use of GenAI, these novel tools have notable limitations and present new risks that must be taken into consideration when using these technologies.

We ask that you review this guidance on the responsible use of GenAI in your work at WilmU.

Scope

This GenAI policy (“Policy”) governs the use of GenAI tools by faculty and staff in the performance of their functions for or on behalf of WilmU. Because this Policy may be updated from time to time, faculty and staff are encouraged to regularly review the most recent version of this Policy. Constructive comments may be submitted here: ogc@wilmu.edu

Definitions

“GenAI” includes any machine-based tool designed to consider user questions, prompts, and other inputs (e.g., text, images, videos) to generate a human-like output (e.g., a response to a question, a written document, software code, or a product design). GenAI includes both standalone offerings such as ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM, and offerings that are embedded in other software, such as Microsoft Copilot.

“Confidential Information” means any business or technical information or research result belonging to WilmU, a faculty member, collaborators or other third parties, that is not publicly known or that has been provided or received under an obligation to maintain the information as confidential. Confidential Information includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Student education records and non-public student work, including grades, transcripts, advising notes, financial aid information, papers, exams, projects, and assessment submissions.
  • Health, disability, counseling, accommodation, accessibility, or Protected Health Information.
  • Personal Information of students, employees, applicants, alumni, donors, vendors, research participants, or other University stakeholders.
  • Employee personnel, compensation, benefits, disciplinary, performance, or workplace investigation materials.
  • Non-public financial, budgetary, banking, payroll, tax, tuition, procurement, payment card, or vendor pricing information.
  • Passwords, credentials, access tokens, security configurations, vulnerability information, or other cybersecurity-related information.
  • Privileged, legal, compliance, audit, litigation, contract, or Office of General Counsel communications or materials.
  • Unpublished research, grant, peer review, human-subjects research, trade secret, proprietary, intellectual property, or confidential third-party information.

“Personal Information” means any information that, whether alone or in combination with other available information, identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, to an individual.

Policy

WilmU expects all faculty and staff to follow these guidelines when using GenAI tools for teaching and research, and work-related functions:

Procuring GenAl Tools/Software (including free tools): Do not purchase or otherwise acquire GenAI tools without first complying with this Policy. Contact WilmU Information Technology (“IT”) before purchasing (or acquiring for free) Al products or products that contain functions that rely on Al to operate when using University resources or University data. IT and the Office of General Counsel (OGC) will evaluate the vendor's product and verify that the contract language does not introduce undue risk to the University. IT can also direct you to existing vendors and potentially avoid duplicate spending. Please contact IT here: helpdesk@wilmu.edu

Do not input Confidential or Personal Information: Faulty and staff must not input any Confidential or Personal Information into GenAI tools, except when permitted by validated contract language and security controls approved by IT and OGC.

Do not input information that violates intellectual property or general contract terms and conditions: Faculty and staff must be aware of the terms and conditions under which they are using GenAI tools. Faculty and staff must respect intellectual property (“IP”) rights with the goal of protecting those IP rights. It is incumbent on the individual users to ensure that the inputs and the outputs of their GenAl tools are properly protected for reasons such as copyright and patent laws, data protection regulations, and identity theft crimes. Such GenAI tools might include Large Language Models (for example, ChatGPT), Machine Learning platforms (for example, AWS SageMaker), or image recognition software (for example, Google Cloud Vision). Please note that vendor licenses govern many of the digital resources provided by the WilmU, and some publishers are asserting that using their content with GenAI tools is not allowed. Please contact the Office of Academic Affairs for assistance in defining acceptable uses for licensed content with a GenAl tool or large language model.

Confirm the accuracy of the output provided by GenAI tools: Faculty and staff must check the accuracy of information generated by GenAI tools prior to relying on such information. GenAI tools should not be relied upon without confirmation of accuracy from additional sources. It is possible for GenAI-generated content to be inaccurate, biased, or entirely fabricated (sometimes called “hallucinations”). Note that such GenAI-generated content may contain copyrighted material. You are responsible for any content that you publish that includes Al-generated material.

Check the output of GenAI tools for bias: Faculty and staff must consider whether the data input into, and the output of, GenAI tools produces decisions that may result in a disparate impact to individuals based on their protected classifications under applicable law, such as race, ethnicity, national origin, age, sexual orientation, or disability status. Do not rely on any output that is indicative of a potential bias.

Disclose the use of GenAI tools: Faculty and staff who leverage GenAI to produce any written materials or other work product must disclose that those materials and that work product is based on or derives from the use of GenAI. Always be transparent if you are relying on the output of a GenAI tool.

Comply with intellectual property rights: Faculty and staff must not hold out any output generated by GenAI tools as their own. If you quote, paraphrase or borrow ideas from the output of GenAI tools, confirm that the output is accurate and that you are not plagiarizing another party's existing work or otherwise violating another party's intellectual property rights.

Ask the GenAI system not to use inputs for training the system: Some GenAI systems permit users to opt out of the use of their data to train future iterations of the GenAI system. Where that option is available, faculty and staff are expected to exercise it and opt out of training.

Do not submit any communications or documents of a legal nature: Submission of legal materials or communications to GenAI tools may risk waiving attorney client privilege or work product protection. Contact the Office of General Counsel (OGC) with any questions.

Additional Considerations for Teaching:

  • Faculty may use University-approved GenAI tools to support the creation or revision of instructional materials, including lesson plans, lecture outlines, discussion prompts, examples, practice questions, rubrics, simulations, case studies, presentations, and other teaching resources. Faculty remain responsible for ensuring that such materials are accurate, accessible, pedagogically appropriate, accessible, and aligned with course learning outcomes and compliant with applicable copyright, licensing, attribution, privacy, and University policy requirements.
  • Faculty shall clearly state in the course syllabus or LMS site any course-specific permitted and prohibited uses of GenAI for the course that deviates from the Wilmington University Policy on Student Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Academic Work, and where appropriate, for specific assignments. The syllabus should also disclose any meaningful faculty use of GenAI to develop course content, instructional materials, activities, assessments, feedback templates, or course-related communications. Incidental editing, formatting, or grammar assistance need not be disclosed.
  • Faculty shall not use GenAI tools to evaluate, grade, score, rank, or make substantive judgments regarding student academic work, including determining whether a student has satisfied assignment requirements, assigning or recommending grades, or making academic integrity determinations. Faculty may use University-approved GenAI tools for limited student assessment support, provided that the faculty member independently reviews the student work, verifies any AI-assisted output, and makes all final evaluative decisions.

Additional Considerations for Research: The policies above apply to all WilmU research activities. In addition, the following considerations and policies also extend to all research activity using GenAI:

  • As with other tools and research methods, individuals who use GenAI in research must be transparent regarding its use, in describing methods, acknowledgements, or elsewhere, as appropriate.
  • GenAI has been found to, among other things, generate citations to papers that do not exist by authors who do not exist, and has also been used to generate images for experiments that were never actually conducted. Researchers are responsible for the accuracy of any content created by Al that is included in any research output and must use caution in utilizing Al output in research.
  • Researchers are expected to follow the policies of journals, funding agencies and professional societies through which they report their research. For example, some journals, such as Science, explicitly prohibit text, figures, images or graphics generated by ChatGPT or any other Al tools.
  • Researchers must avoid uploading, or using as input, any unpublished research data or other Confidential Information into a GenAI tool.
  • When a researcher inputs unpublished work of any kind into a GenAI tool, the unpublished work may become part of the universe of data in the AI. The model may incorporate the unpublished work into responses to queries from other researchers. Disclosure of unpublished work to a GenAI tool may also impede or prevent future intellectual property protection for the unpublished work or give rise to privacy violations.
  • Researchers must avoid uploading, or using as input, other parties' Confidential Information. GenAI tools may not provide protection for Confidential Information, and their use could create the potential to breach confidential contractual commitments.
    • This includes, e.g., unpublished manuscripts or funding proposals that researchers may be asked to peer review. NIH and NSF, among others, prohibit using GenAI for peer review.
    • This also includes the Personal Information of research subjects. For example, inputting interview data to perform preliminary analysis creates the possibility that quotations or other information from research subjects could become public, and potentially, that subjects could also be identified.
  • Researchers should be mindful that the output of GenAI tools may infringe the rights of third parties since the responses generated are pooled from already established works.
  • Researchers using GenAI with human subject data, interview transcripts, survey responses, or identifiable information must comply with Human Subject Research Committee requirements and approved protocols.