Ethics of Using Generative AI in Academia

There are two things to think about when you start approaching the use of generative AI for creation of anything to do with academia:

1. Whether it is ethical
2. Whether it is useful to do so

Let’s start with the first bit. Is it ethical?

Yes, you can use AI to support your work to speed up or build complicated tasks but it always needs to be double-checked. I use AI for a number of things. I am using AI to create this at the moment, but I’m not using generative AI. I’m actually using an AI-based dictation tool, Wispr Flow, that helps me to make these posts. I have also used ChatGPT to generate the image for this post.

But I don’t use generative AI for everything I do, and I always double-check it – I can’t emphasize this enough.

Also, do not put anything into an AI tool that you do not want to be shared publicly. This is a learning tool, and as such it will learn from your inputs. Do not use sensitive information, or use it to construct anything business sensitive. And never upload students work, even if it is to check if it has been written by AI. Stick to the old fashioned ‘this does not look like your own work’ and think about how to investigate this as if it was an essay mill or peer writing this for them.

Secondly, whether it is useful to do so.

I use generative AI quite a lot for building Moodle quizzes. and this is really helpful. Now you need to remember about how generative AI works – it acts using common language so you need to talk to it more than you would do with a search engine and actually ask it to do something rather than just putting in some text and expecting an answer. You also need to set rules. I’m going to show you how to do this a little more in the next few posts and hopefully you can follow along and use generative AI to be productive as an academic.

I try not to use AI when there is no benefit to doing so, and that I could complete the task successfully on my own. There is an environmental cost to every task you use AI for, and this should be weighed against the benefit of doing it myself. A quick search on Google Scholar can show you how much research is available on the environmental costs of using AI, and they are not insignificant.