Our Guiding Principles

To ensure our engagement with AI is rooted in Lehigh’s core values and our commitment to academic excellence, intellectual curiosity, and an inclusive community, we will be guided by the following principles:

  • Foster Innovation and Exploration: We encourage our students, faculty, and staff to explore and experiment with AI tools to enhance creativity, deepen understanding, and discover new efficiencies in their work.
  • Uphold Academic Integrity and Policy Requirements: Use of AI by Lehigh faculty, students, and staff must occur within the bounds of existing policies, codes of conduct, and legal obligations.  We are committed to the principle that students, faculty, and staff are ultimately responsible for the work they create and the ideas they claim as their own.
  • Promote Ethical and Responsible Use: We recognize that AI technologies carry significant ethical implications, including the potential for bias, misinformation, and privacy concerns.  We also recognize that AI is a disruptive force that will have a variable impact on people and the future of work. The Lehigh community is committed to engaging with AI in a manner that is critical, ethical, and responsible. We will strive to ensure fairness, transparency, accountability, and respect for privacy and data security in our development and application of AI systems.  We will strive to always remain human-centered as we engage with AI and other technologies.
  • Empower Our Community through Education and Dialogue: Preparing our community for an AI-enabled future is a shared responsibility. Lehigh is committed to providing ongoing education, training, and opportunities for open dialogue about AI's capabilities, limitations, and societal impact. Together, we will equip our students with the "AI-readiness" necessary to thrive as leaders and engaged citizens in a world increasingly shaped by these technologies. 

 

Guidelines and Policies

In order to foster responsible exploration within the bounds of policy and good practice, we offer the following reminders of existing policies that Lehigh faculty, staff, students, and affiliates are expected to follow:

  • By default, Generative AI tools collect and store data from users as part of their learning process. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini allow you to opt out of allowing your content to be used to train their models. Unless you have opted out or are certain an AI system walls off information you upload, assume that the information you submit will become part of the system’s training data, which it may then share with future users.
  • Those who provide the university with private, protected data trust that we will treat that data ethically and in accordance with legal requirements and guidelines. This guidance applies to any online information system, not just to those that use Generative AI tools.
  • For this reason you may not submit institutional data, restricted data, or critical data–this restriction is covered by Lehigh’s Acceptable Use of Computing Systems Policy. Examples of data that may not be submitted to such systems include Social Security Numbers, credit card numbers, student records, financial records, health care records; data that fall under export control or ITAR regulations; employment records, legal records; and intellectual property you do not have the right to distribute. For more information, see Office of Institutional Data’s Classification of Data page.
  • If you have a use case for Generative AI that involves such data, submit an LTS consultation request so we can advise you and help you ensure data safety and legal compliance.
  • Any member of the Lehigh community who learns of a potential breach of data protection or confidentiality— through the use of Generative AI tools or otherwise —is required by Section 5 of Lehigh’s Acceptable Use Policy to report the incident to the Office of Information Security at security@lehigh.edu.