On the Uncritical Adoption of “AI” in Academia
With thoughts turning to the new academic year I noticed an Open Letter to Universities in the Netherlands, which I have signed. You can read the letter yourself but here is a summary of the main calls to action:
• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful.
• Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.
• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry’s framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety.
• Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces.
• Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.
I agree with all of these. I don’t think The Management does though.
In Maynooth University there has been a total absence of leadership from the Management about the academic threats posed by the uncritical adoption of “AI” . I’ve put “AI” in quotes because most of what is being described as AI nowadays (e.g. LLMs) is not is in no way Artifical Intelligence. There is a place for such things as Machine Learning. Indeed, much of the data-driven research in my own field of cosmology would be impossible without them. The key, however, is not whether you insist on calling it AI or not, but the word uncritical. Much of what I have heard from our “Leadership” is simple-minded boosterism. And yes, that word is in quotes for the same reason as “AI”.
In planning my teaching for next term, which starts in two weeks, I have taken a hard line on assignments. I allow no assignment to contribute to a module grade unless it is supervised in such a way as to prevent “AI” being used. Both modules I will be teaching next semester are mathematical in nature, and the summative assessments will consist of four (unseen) in-class tests and a written exam. Phones, laptops and tablets are banned from all these.
I believe that this is the only way to maintain the integrity of these assessments and that to do anything else will result in a lowering of academic standards. I believe this is the case across a great many disciplines, so there should be university-wide regulations to manage it. I find the absence of any “Leadership” on this scandalous (but I’m afraid not surprising).
This is not to say that I will band the use of LLMs etc entirely. Students will be free to use ChatGPT or CoPilot or whatever to check their answers to the formative assessments I hand out, if they think that will help, but these will not contribute to their module mark.
In the Dark 
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