$1 million AI grant to be shared by California universities

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(The Center Square) - A $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation will go toward paying for artificial intelligence classes and other on-campus programs at two Inland Empire-area universities, according to officials and educators.

University of California, Riverside and California State University, San Bernardino will each get portions of that $1 million, with $600,000 going to CSU San Bernardino and $400,000 going to UC Riverside, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-San Bernardino.

Professors at UC Riverside want to use the grant to pay for an AI minor, student research projects and other programs.

The grant follows a Legislative Analyst’s report in August showing that enthusiasm about AI technology has contributed to a 50% rise in the stock market in the last two years. A “meteoric rise” in the valuation of a handful of big tech companies in California, including Amazon, Meta and Google, has also contributed to larger income tax receipts for the state, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“The immediate thing that I feel should be done and is happening here is to make AI education broadly accessible, not just to computer science and electrical engineering students,” Evangelos Papalexakis, associate professor at UC Riverside, told The Center Square on Monday. “The whole campus being able to understand how they can use those tools in a way that they can improve their productivity, help them make breakthroughs in their research and so on, is a thing that we’re looking for.”

According to Aguilar’s office, the money comes from a program at the National Science Foundation called the Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Enriching Learning, Programs and Student Experiences. Aguilar’s office and UC Riverside professors told The Center Square on Monday that some of the money will be used to fund an “AI help desk,” which will be open to local businesses and organizations who need help with AI challenges.

“We need to educate our students so that they are ready when they come out to work, to find good jobs,” Vassilis Tsotras, a computational science and engineering professor at UC Riverside, told The Center Square on Monday. “In particular, the area where UC Riverside is, this is an area where students come from low-income families, so this is an opportunity for them to get a better chance in life. Our view is we should educate them about how to use AI for good.”

According to studies conducted on AI technology, artificial intelligence can retain inherent biases programmed into them by their creators. Stanford University researchers found that left-leaning political biases can inadvertently be programmed into AI language learning models.

“AI tells you what it thinks you want to hear,” said Spence Purnell, senior fellow of technology and innovation at R Street, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for free markets and limited government.

“I can get it to make right-leaning responses if I really want," Purnell told The Center Square Monday. "Why it defaults to something more left-leaning is probably a combination of human input, information mediums and the nature of political information.”

A study published in the academic journal Nature last year found AI can generate racist decisions based on someone’s dialect. And a 2024 United Nations study found AI can contribute to technological manifestations of racist discrimination.

Researchers from Northeastern University conducted a study published earlier this year about how AI can be manipulated to give advice about how to self-harm - a harmful use of AI that teens have used, according to previous reporting from The Center Square. Papalexakis and Tsotras told The Center Square on Monday that AI-related courses at UC Riverside teach technology ethics and help train students about AI dangers that many students aren’t aware of.

“Technology ethics is extremely important,” Purnell told The Center Square. “We just have to be careful when we’re crafting regulations or civic norms around technology that we remember to capture the benefits for kids who are using it the right way, while also mitigating the harms for the kids who are using it the wrong way.”

Aguilar’s office did not respond to The Center Square on Monday. Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-San Ramon, who is a member of the Legislative Technology and Innovation Caucus and authored AI legislation in the state legislature this year, was not available for an interview on Monday.

Other legislators who sit on technology-related committees in the Assembly and State Senate did not respond to The Center Square. Officials and professors at CSU San Bernardino declined to answer questions on Monday.