Disruption and OpportunityPresident Jayathi Murthy on how artificial intelligence will shape Oregon State’s future.

The media tends to emphasize the scary aspects of AI, from it making artists and writers irrelevant to it fueling disinformation. They don’t talk a lot about what AI could do for science. How do you think AI is going to change OSU research?

AI is going to be transformative. There’s no question about that in my mind, and I don’t consider it to be hype. At Oregon State, AI will be used to gain deeper insights, to drive new kinds of research and to drive the kind of work that we’re already doing — but to do it faster, to do it better, and to pull in more data.

AI can supercharge the rate at which we work. Right now, that rate is determined by how quickly we can synthesize information. In the old days, you’d go to the library, and you’d read a bunch of articles and put in requests for books that needed to be found for you. That’s of course accelerated since the World Wide Web came along. But now with AI, there’s a way of not just searching but synthesizing human knowledge and making it available in a way that allows you to move much, much faster. The kind of research and the kind of results that took you years are possible in months. That is huge.

That’s such an important point about searching versus synthesizing. Readers who haven’t experimented with AI yet might think of it as sort of a high-powered search engine.

It’s much more than that. It’s going from data to information to knowledge and perhaps, eventually, even to wisdom. You brought up the idea that AI may make artists and writers irrelevant. I don’t know that I agree with that. It’s sort of like when photography came along, there were lots of people who said, “Gosh, why paint anymore?” But artists found a way to interact with that medium to create new things that at one point didn’t exist as art. And the same thing is going to happen here. Sure, there’ll be a certain kind of art that AI will make, but humans, because of their nature, because of their humanity, will interact with the things that AI makes. And there’ll be new modes of expression.

What role will the new Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex play in integrating AI into the student experience at OSU?

It’s given us a way of focusing on AI on campus. Otherwise, it would be a lot of people doing good things, but without a stake in the ground, without a way of pointing to something that is the heart of AI at the university. The building plays that symbolic role first and foremost.

But there’s also a lot of stuff in the building. There is certainly the supercomputer, which provides capacity in a way that most universities in the country don’t have. OSU has always been really good at robotics, but robotics will increasingly have more and more AI in it.  All of the investments in robotics get folded into this AI vision.

Then there’s all the other work that’s going to draw on AI — for example, the experimental infrastructure tied to use in semiconductors. That’s going to get rolled up in not only new generations of materials and semiconductors and processes, but also things like semiconductor design, which increasingly draws on AI. And students will get exposed to and get to participate in all these programs.

Do you anticipate that the university will need to make policies for student use of AI?

At this stage, I’d prefer to have guidelines rather than rigid policies. You’ve got to allow this to evolve. My hope is to go beyond constraint to really look for the creative. I can’t think of a community that is better suited to deal with this question than an academic campus. We will debate it. We’ll test it in the classroom. We will think it through in deep ways. From this, we will evolve guidelines and — as our understanding of AI use matures — we will know enough to make strong policies.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this spring?

AI is disruptive, and there are so many other disruptions sweeping through our world right now. In a time of extreme change, finding your guiding light, finding your vision, finding your mission and holding true to your values is a very useful way of living your life. When we’re looking to make decisions at OSU, our focus must be on students, students, students. We are here to educate in the broadest possible way. Maintaining access, maximizing opportunity, building excellence — that’s our guiding light. Everything else follows.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.