A new commission at the University of Wyoming is crafting guidelines for using artificial intelligence (AI) on campus.
Its initial report later this year will outline opportunities for research and private or government partnerships, while recommending guardrails for ethically using AI in the classroom.
UW leaders tapped School of Computing Associate Director Jeff Hamerlinck to helm the effort. A GIS researcher by training, Hamerlinck has seen AI move from the realm of software development and specialist research tools to mainstream popularity.
“This is really becoming a big part of higher education now, and we can't just ignore it,” he said. “We need to be able to deal with it, both taking advantage of opportunities, but also responding to potential negative impacts.”
The commission is not UW’s first foray into AI policy work. When the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 ignited the AI boom, individual instructors started to grapple with AI use in their classrooms. UW named a dedicated committee that has gathered resources and published some publicly available guidelines.
But the university’s new commission will be the furthest reaching effort yet.
Its charge includes looking into hiring practices, the landscape of research funding opportunities, such as through the nascent federal Genesis Project, and the use of AI tools in scientific research.
“On our campus, we’ve had a great bunch of faculty that have been working on this, thinking about the potential positive impacts of AI, but also viewing it in a cautionary way and understanding some potential drawbacks,” Hamerlinck said. “The idea behind the commission is to really broaden out our ability to coordinate and support AI activities across the campus, to kind of cover all those different categories of application areas.”
The commission builds on efforts already underway to expand research into AI and grow the university’s computing capabilities.
While ChatGPT remains one of the most popular AI applications, "artificial intelligence” is a much broader, and even “fuzzier,” umbrella term, now used in marketing to describe everything from chess-playing robots to social media feed algorithms to image generators. That broad category encompasses many tools already in use in academic settings.
UW President Ed Seidel said AI has a long history in labs and research computing, including in his own career. As a physicist aiding in the hunt for gravitational waves, Sediel said AI techniques like training a neural network to “very rapidly” identify signals in large datasets accelerated his work.
“Finding patterns was really useful in identifying signals in gravitational wave detectors that would previously take millions of CPU hours, millions of hours of computer time, to try to find a signal,” Seidel said.
He said the UW commission will consider how the university can leverage even newer and emerging applications. That might even include “self-driving labs.”
“We’re looking at building some laboratories now in science — chemistry and material science and physics — that will be run by … robotics and artificial intelligence techniques,” Seidel said. “For example, they could read a paper that just came out, realize that they could do the experiment in the laboratory and have it done automatically, and then extend the results and even draft up the results into a new paper. That kind of thing is possible now.”
AI-assisted or AI-led research could have some very Wyoming-specific benefits, Seidel added.
“We’re looking for ways to make asphalt out of coal,” the president said, referring to ongoing efforts to find non-energy uses for Wyoming coal. “So there might be ways that you change the recipe a little bit and a little bit and a little bit and a little bit, and then you see which one makes the best kind of asphalt out of coal.”
But AI isn’t without its critics, who point to the drawbacks of outsourcing too much human activity or the ethical concerns raised by new applications.
In 2026 alone, AI tools have been used by the White House to alter immigration arrest photos and more, “AI-enhanced” images of major news events have muddied the discourse waters by going viral, and Elon Musk’s AI application Grok produced millions of nonconsensual nude images, including some of children, based on user prompts. Its owners have since restricted its image-making capabilities, though a Reuters investigation found Grok was still producing such images when prompted.
In academia, instructors have seen a subset of students turning to tools like ChatGPT to generate essays from scratch, while students, including at UW, have alleged instructors are using AI to generate course material or to grade assignments.
“With our students, it's important to recognize that they do have access to these tools and they’re going to access them,” Hamerlinck said. “But I think it’s important that we set some ground rules and sidebars around what appropriate and inappropriate, and ethical and unethical, use of AI tools are.”
Other observers worry AI technology has been overhyped and overvalued, and that we are now living in an AI bubble. Whatever happens on the economic side, Hamerlinck said “hype cycles” for tech are nothing new, and AI tools that are legitimately helpful for education, research or other purposes are here to stay.
“It's good to recognize that, yeah, there is going to be hype about these kinds of new innovative technologies,” he said. “That said, I think AI is a very transformative technology and set of methodologies. And while the hype around it may decrease a little bit, it's not going away. And as I said before, it's been there way before ChatGPT and it will continue to grow.”
President Seidel agreed.
“I would just say it's unstoppable, so we have to learn how to use it really effectively and ethically and to our advantage,” he said. “How do we make sure that all of our students and faculty and staff have the right kinds of tools, given what's out there? So how do we adopt them? How do we make sure they're available? How do we use them to enhance business processes?”
UW is hosting a mini-conference for faculty on Feb. 16 that will highlight “practical strategies” for integrating AI in their classrooms. It runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Coe Library and via Zoom, though registration is limited.
The commission plans to publish its first official report, “UW and AI Today,” by mid-June, “providing a strategic framework for UW’s AI policy, investments and best practices over the ensuing two years.”
