Artificial intelligence & AI Tools

You should not make use of AI in the production of any work for assessment without first discussing this with your lecturer. Your lecturer may ask you not to use this technology, and explain why, and you should respect this position.

There is a huge amount of development of such tools across the world without any effective regulation. The development and adoption of such tools has major implications for all aspects of higher education and other aspects of life, such as employment and social and political trends.

ATU, like all other higher education bodies across the world, is assessing this rapidly developing field and its implications for learning, teaching and assessment.

It is important at this point to reinforce a number of basic principles in relation to assessment of learning:

1. Assessment is how you can communicate your learning to others. It is important for your personal and career development that learning is your learning and not that of a computer programme or machine.
2. The quality, integrity and value of your qualification, and all others with ATU qualifications, depends on the quality and integrity of the assessment process.
3. You need to approach assessment tasks in a spirit of honest communication with your lecturers and your peers, and not seek unfair advantage, or engage in deception.
4. Attempting to represent the output of any other person or computer programme as your own, without suitable attribution, is a breach of academic integrity.

If you are using, or intending to use AI in your learning or assessment, you need to be aware of its limitations. These can include false information, bias, breaches of intellectual property rights, and the significant environmental and labour issues involved in the creation of these services.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Guidelines for Educators

Guidelines for the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Service

• Chatbots & Virtual Assistants (e.g., Siri, Alexa)

• Image Recognition Tools (e.g., facial recognition software, Google Images)

• AI in Healthcare (e.g., robotic surgeries, diagnosing diseases)

• Recommendation Systems (e.g., YouTube, Netflix, Amazon)

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools (e.g., Grammarly, translation apps like Google Translate)

ChatGPT is a natural language processing model introduced by San Francisco-based company OpenAI in November 2022, that produces convincing and engaging conversations based on your input. 

With its remarkable abilities, ChatGPT has rapidly become a popular tool for various applications, from chatbots to content creation.

• It can simulate human-like language and hold conversations.
• It helps automate tasks and assists with content creation (e.g., writing, art, code). 
• It opens up new possibilities in industries like healthcare, education, and business.
• There are ethical concerns about its impact on society and how it could be misused.
• It has the potential to change how we live, work, and interact with technology, which is why it's getting so much attention.

Can I trust that it's telling me the truth?

• Limited knowledge: ChatGPT is not able to access all of the knowledge that humans have, and it has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021.
• Lack of common sense: ChatGPT has been trained on a huge amount of text data, but it lacks the ability to understand and apply common sense understanding to a situation.
• Limitation in understanding context: ChatGPT can generate logical and confident responses, but it may not always entirely understand the context or purpose of the person's input.
• Potential biases in reponses: ChatGPT has been trained on a substantial dataset of text from the internet, which may have biases. This might lead to the model reproducing and expanding those biases in its responses.
• Lack of accountability: ChatGPT is a machine learning model and not a human, so it can make mistakes or generate incorrect responses. There is no way to hold the model accountable for its responses.
• Limited to text-based interface: ChatGPT is a language model and its capabilities are limited to text-based interactions. It does not have the ability to understand or interpret non-textual inputs, such as images or audio.

The introduction of ChatGPT has raised academic integrity issues and concerns.

Some of the key concerns are related to the ways in which ChatGPT can be used to abuse academic and research integrity by submitting essays, projects, etc. that are not their own (plagiarism). There are also concerns about the possible negative impact on students’ critical thinking skills.

There are privacy concerns around the data that models like ChatGPT swallow from the internet and from users, and even problems with the models slandering or libelling people.

No one was asked whether OpenAI could use our data; this is a clear violation of privacy.

• Introduction to artificial intelligence. 

• GPT-4: The New GPT Release and What You Need to Know.

• How to Research and Write Using Generative AI Tools.

• The EU Artificial Intelligence Act. 2024.
• Cotton, D.R., Cotton, P.A. and Shipway, J.R., 2023. Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, pp.1-12.
• Gao, C.A., Howard, F.M., Markov, N.S., Dyer, E.C., Ramesh, S., Luo, Y. and Pearson, A.T., 2022. Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers. bioRxiv, pp.2022-12.
• Lund, B.D. and Wang, T., 2023. Chatting about ChatGPT: how may AI and GPT impact academia and libraries?. Library Hi Tech News, 40(3), pp.26-29.
• National Academic Integrity Network, 2023. Guidance for generative AI in education and research - UNESCO Digital Library
• UNESCO, Sabzalieva, E. and Valentini, A., 2023. ChatGPT and artificial intelligence in higher education: quick start guide. 
• UNESCO, Miao, F., Shiohira, K. and Lao, N., 2024. AI competency framework for students. 

If you use generative AI in your work, cite it clearly—just like any other source. Proper attribution builds your credibility, supports academic integrity, and helps others track your ideas.