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Abstract The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years has focused attention on how diverse stakeholders regulate these technologies to ensure their safe and ethical use. Increasingly, governmental bodies, corporations, and nonprofit organizations are developing strategies and policies for AI governance. While existing literature on ethical AI has focused on the various principles and guidelines that have emerged as a result of these efforts, just how these principles are operationalized and translated to broader policy is still the subject of current research. Specifically, there is a gap in our understanding of how policy practitioners actively engage with, contextualize, or reflect on existing AI ethics policies in their daily professional activities. The perspectives of these policy experts towards AI regulation generally are not fully understood. To this end, this paper explores the perceptions of scientists and engineers in policy-related roles in the US public and nonprofit sectors towards AI ethics policy, both in the US and abroad. We interviewed 15 policy experts and found that although these experts were generally familiar with AI governance efforts within their domains, overall knowledge of guiding frameworks and critical regulatory policies was still limited. There was also a general perception among the experts we interviewed that the US lagged behind other comparable countries in regulating AI, a finding that supports the conclusion of existing literature. Lastly, we conducted a preliminary comparison between the AI ethics policies identified by the policy experts in our study and those emphasized in existing literature, identifying both commonalities and areas of divergence. 

Abstract As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT become more capable and accessible, their use in educational settings is likely to grow. However, the academic community lacks a comprehensive understanding of the perceptions and attitudes of students and instructors toward these new tools. In the Fall 2023 semester, we surveyed 982 students and 76 faculty at a large public university in the United States, focusing on topics such as perceived ease of use, ethical concerns, the impact of GenAI on learning, and differences in responses by role, gender, and discipline. We found that students and faculty did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward GenAI in higher education, except regarding ease of use, hedonic motivation, habit, and interest in exploring new technologies. Students and instructors also used GenAI for coursework or teaching at similar rates, although regular use of these tools was still low across both groups. Among students, we found significant differences in attitudes between males in STEM majors and females in non-STEM majors. These findings underscore the importance of considering demographic and disciplinary diversity when developing policies and practices for integrating GenAI in educational contexts, as GenAI may influence learning outcomes differently across various groups of students. This study contributes to the broader understanding of how GenAI can be leveraged in higher education while highlighting potential areas of inequality that need to be addressed as these tools become more widely used.