The Institute Needs to Embrace the Emergence of AI in Academia

By Sine Schei

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the landscape of education and has amazing potential to fundamentally change how we as students approach our work and develop our understanding. And yet at the Institute we are facing a disservice by not being properly taught how to effectively utilise such tools. 

“If students are using ChatGPT to generate ideas and language for their work and properly citing the source of the generated content, then it should not be considered plagiarism. However, if students are using ChatGPT to directly copy and paste text without proper attribution, then it would be considered plagiarism” – that is the answer ChatGPT gave me when I asked whether the use of Chat GPT should be considered plagiarism at universities.

The official policy on citations and plagiarism at the Institute is relatively standard. “All reproductions of elements conceived of by others” should be cited, and work submitted by students should always form “an original and personal intellectual contribution.” Lastly, “reproducing, without correctly citing the source, texts taken from the Internet or another platform, even if unsigned and/or in the absence of designated authors, constitutes plagiarism.”

This policy is easy to understand and is clear as to when it applies to traditional sources. The question that arises now, however, is whether it is sufficient to cite output created by AI as text taken from the Internet – and whether any contribution from AI to a student’s academic submission can be considered to contribute to their original and personal intellectual contributions. 

In the current version of the Institute’s Directive on Academic Integrity, this dilemma is expanded upon. The directive states that “Using artificial intelligence (e.g. artificial intelligence content generators such as ChatGPT) does not as such account for academic misconduct; however submitting all or part of an assessment item that has been created solely using artificial intelligence and claiming it as your own qualifies as academic misconduct.”

So what does this really mean for students at the Institute? Not much at all, I would argue. An initial gut reaction to this may very well be that it certainly will be considered as plagiarism, if an entire submission is written by AI. But acknowledging this does not solve the issue of understanding where to draw the boundary on the use of AI as a tool in academia. 

Recently, new software has been developed that is able to recognize AI-produced text, mimicking the benefits of regular plagiarism checkers such as Turnitin. In this manner, the Institute’s plagiarism policy could be updated to include a full ban on AI, and today’s technology would easily allow faculty to detect it.

But is prohibiting modern technology the right path to take in academia? First year students of the MINT programme at the Institute are certainly receiving mixed answers to this globally relevant concern. In the mandatory Global Issues and Perspectives II course, students were told that the professor would not be concerned if AI is used in the development of their academic work. The same week, it was made very clear in a mandatory workshop for the Applied Research Project (ARP) that students should refrain from using such tools.

The contrasting discourse among faculty at the Institute certainly mimics that of the wider international academic community. As detectors for AI-generated texts have been developed, it would be easy to develop the Institute’s policy to delineate concrete rules, such as requiring students to cite if and when AI generated text is included in their final submission. Whether it is the right way to go or not, it would be a predictable path to take, one that would reduce the concern many students are feeling about using this new technology. 

However, an AI detector will not be able to tell a professor when a student has used a generator to find case studies, write pieces of code, or suggest outlines and research questions. And that is precisely why the Institute should not discourage the use of ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot. 

The use of AI in academia has the potential to revolutionize knowledge production, perhaps most in terms of efficiency. Discouraging students from engaging with these tools will simply mean that the Institute will fail to educate students with critical knowledge on the benefits and shortcomings of AI. For the benefit of faculty and students alike, the Institute needs to further clarify its directives on plagiarism and academic integrity regarding the use of AI. 
Whether we like it or not, AI is a phenomenon that is here to stay – seemingly even developing their own feelings and thoughts, approaching the most human of experiences by falling in love. A future with AI may seem daunting, but it will be significantly less scary if academic institutions like ours educate students on using and integrating AI into their practices.

Whilst you are here!

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