AI Tools: Academic Concerns

Academic integrity and the ethical use of information are critical elements of higher education and are key parts of UWL's mission.

One of the significant concerns is the potential for students to misuse chat AI platforms to generate plagiarized content. If students use AI to generate essays, assignments, or other academic work without proper citation or attribution, it can lead to academic dishonesty. Students are strongly advised to talk with their professors before using AI tools as part of their research process.

Over-reliance on chat AI for research or problem-solving tasks can hinder students' development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Relying solely on AI-generated responses may limit your ability to think independently and analyze information effectively.

AI, like any other tool, can be very useful for getting assistance on your research, helping provide a broader view of the topic than you may have started with, and even for helping locate relevant research articles. We suggest that students use it like Wikipedia, as a tool to get to more resources and more sides of the research topic, but not as a source that you would quote and cite.

AI has many uses on college and university campuses. One early visible example is Turnitin, which began incorporating AI capabilities to enhance its plagiarism detection algorithms, improve grading assistance, and provide additional insights into student writing in early 2022. They officially released their AI writing detection preview in April 2023. The current detector is trained for long-form English content and can detect GPT-3/3.5 and ChatGPT signatures. Turnitin plans to regularly iterate and expand AI writing functionality.

Copyright Lawsuits

One concern among visual artists is how AI Image Generators scrape the Internet for images and then use those without regard for copyright.

Some lawsuits were filed in early 2023 alleging that copyrighted images were being used by AI image generators in violation of the rights of millions of artists.

Ownership

There is also a question of who owns the information you give an AI Tool. Many of them have a section in their Terms that says they are free to use everything you type in, at least for training their AI models and shaping their future responses. Some may even claim ownership of that content. Which means if you are using it for expanding your research, especially in preparation for publication, you should not put your own sensitive research materials into any AI tool.

Gemini Chat (Google) says right up front: "Your conversations are processed by human reviewers to improve the technologies powering Gemini Apps. Don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want reviewed or used."

On the other hand, Elicit says: "When you upload papers to analyze in Elicit, those papers will remain private to you and will not be shared with anyone else."

Source: Bing Image Creator