Members of the Academic Senate discuss agenda items during the senate meeting on Tuesday, May 21. Microsoft Copilot, an “AI companion,” can now be accessed by students, faculty and staff through their El Camino College email accounts, as announced at the meeting. (Johan Van Wier | The Union)

A free generative AI service is now available for students, faculty and staff to use through their Microsoft email accounts.

Microsoft Copilot is a free “AI companion” available for Microsoft users to summarize documents and generate text and images, Vice President of Academic Technology Stephanie Burnham announced at the Academic Senate meeting on May 21.

Students, faculty and staff can access the free version of Copilot through their El Camino College email accounts. There are two other advanced versions of the AI software that charge $20 to $30 per month.

Copilot is a data-protected service, meaning chat history is not saved and commercial data is not sent to external sources.

Copilot uses ChatGPT-4 for text creation and DALL-E 3 for image creation, two generative AI services created by OpenAI.

Burnham said the requirements for using Copilot vary per professor, as each instructor may have different AI policies.

“Students should really be aware that AI policies can differ from department to department and professor to professor…whether it’s used at all or in what ways it’s used,” Burnham said.

The Academic Technology Committee, which Burnham leads, is assessing other AI programs to potentially bring to El Camino.

“We are definitely keeping our eye out for what could be beneficial to both faculty and students and also trying to be cognizant about the conversations going around AI,” she said.