AI at Emerson College

Emerson College is embracing the future of Artificial Intelligence with curiosity, creativity, and care. We believe AI is a powerful tool, but it is not a substitute for human imagination, judgment, or ethical responsibility. The College has established guiding principles, deployed enterprise AI tools for the entire community, launched pilot courses that integrate AI into creative disciplines, and published standards for safe and responsible use. This site is your starting point for understanding what Emerson is doing with AI and how you can engage.

Guiding Principles

Story Comes First

Human imagination should remain the origin of all creative work. We will strive to choose technologies, emerging and legacy alike, based on their suitability to advance the human creator’s vision. Decisions, discernment, and accountability remain ours. We accept full responsibility for the integrity of the final work, regardless of the tools used.

Career Readiness

Preparation for the job market increasingly requires familiarity and engagement with AI and emerging technologies. We commit to providing every student with the opportunity to develop AI literacy tailored to their respective professional fields.

Transparency and Integrity

We are transparent about the use of AI in our creative processes. We do not present AI-generated creative content as entirely human-produced work.

Critical Engagement

While AI content generation is comparatively faster and easier, the value of human judgment remains paramount. High-value AI use requires skepticism and rigor: verifying sources, questioning biases, addressing ethical concerns, and refining output that is otherwise generic or incorrect. We commit to providing students the necessary context to engage debates surrounding its development, use, and governance.

Protect Privacy

We prohibit the input of sensitive, confidential, or proprietary College data into public or unauthorized AI systems. College Data is classified in the Data Governance Policy.

These principles are not static. We will review and update this document annually to remain aligned with technological and professional shifts and ethical concerns. Questions and comments may be sent to ai@emerson.edu.

Common Questions

Emerson currently offers a variety of AI tools for all community members, including Google Gemini, NotebookLM, Adobe Firefly, and Zoom AI Companion. Additionally, the College is offering several AI-focused courses, including AI Filmmaking pilot courses in ELA and Boston, and Sustainable Publishing with AI. Specific courses offer additional AI software and tools. In the past year, workshops were held for staff and faculty to promote AI literacy, and IT published a set of procurement standards, safety guidelines, and support definitions for AI software used on campus.

Emerson has also established a set of AI Guiding Principles and launched a strategic initiative focused on three areas: AI literacy training for students, faculty, and staff; academic infrastructure to help departments develop standards and expectations for AI in their fields; and a public-facing web presence that catalogs our principles, highlights AI-related courses, and showcases how our community is engaging with these technologies. The initiative is co-led by IT and Academic Affairs leadership, in consultation and collaboration with academic chairs and deans and the Emerging Tech Initiative.

Our principles do not require faculty to use AI tools in their pedagogy. They do establish that the College has an institutional commitment to AI literacy. The goal is to ensure students graduate with an understanding of these technologies relevant to their fields, while respecting that different disciplines will approach this differently.

Yes. The Critical Engagement principle explicitly commits the College to providing students the context to engage debates surrounding AI’s development, use, and governance. Emerson’s Emerging Tech Initiative includes faculty and staff who bring critical perspectives on environmental costs, labor implications, equity gaps in AI development, and the role of private industry. The College takes the position that responsible engagement requires understanding both the capabilities and the risks, not uncritical adoption.

The College recognizes that the infrastructure behind AI technologies carries real environmental and social costs, and we believe our students should understand those dimensions as part of a complete education. Several faculty members are engaged in research and teaching that directly addresses the political economies and externalities of emerging technologies. This is an active area of discussion within the Emerson community and is part of why Critical Engagement is a principle.

The fifth guiding principle explicitly prohibits the use of sensitive, confidential, or proprietary data in public or unauthorized AI systems. The institutionally supported tools (Gemini, Adobe AI, Zoom AI) operate under enterprise agreements with privacy protections. The College’s AI literacy training includes guidance on which tools are approved, what data can and cannot be used, and how to work within a safe and ethical framework.

The principles establish that transparency about AI use in creative processes is expected. Beyond that, what constitutes legitimate versus illegitimate AI-assisted work will be defined at the department and course level. This is one of the areas the initiative is actively supporting faculty in developing clearer standards around.

The Emerging Tech Initiative is a faculty and staff group that serves as a forum for cross-disciplinary discussion about AI and other emerging technologies. It provides feedback to institutional leadership, fosters collaboration in research and teaching, connects Emerson with broader higher education networks working on these issues, and helps identify opportunities to bring speakers, events, and expertise to campus.