Students & Generative AI

Checking Grammar & Style / Translating

Helping you get going

For this use, ask your professor, who may be happier to see your own words than words corrected by AI.

If your prof allows, keep AI use as limited as possible. Review carefully whatever AI suggests you should change. A suggested correction might be wrong and could make the new version worse than the original.

If English is your second language, some professors may allow you to write in your first language and use AI to translate the assignment into English. If you do this, check the English translation to be sure it reflects what you want to say. Note: Use translation only with permission from your professor.

AI can:

• Suggest research topics
• Provide background to help you understand topics
• Critique research questions (but you need to write your own questions first)
• Suggest search terminology

Big caution: Don't let AI create a bibliography for you. There is high risk that many of the "citations" will be invented rather than describing actual articles and books.

Some AI use ideas

For courses teaching AI use...

Reviewing / Exam preparation

If your professor is teaching you the skills to optimize AI, the sky is the limit.

The professor may show you how to create AI prompts to produce outputs, then assign you the task of creating your own prompts and generating results, which you can revise further in various ways with AI.

You might experiment with AI in creation of audio or visual media.

For such courses, developing AI ability is the goal.

You can ask AI to summarize your notes, create bullet points, and so on.

You can let AI set up quizzes for you to help you review course content.

You can have AI prepare sample exams based on whatever format your professor has indicated s/he will use in the final.

If your professor permits more extensive AI use, here are some ideas:

Education is about the process

You can create a product for your professor - an essay, a project, a work of art - and think the goal is the product. But goal is really the process, by which you learn how to create the essay, etc.

Training your brain with problem-solving and critical thinking ability (process) is more important than submitting a product. AI is only a useful tool when it helps you develop your own abilities.

It is a foe when it does your thinking for you. Don't let it sabotage your educational development.

Education is about developing YOU

AI is a tool, not a solution

Bottom Line

Your prof is your guide

A central role of higher education is expanding your research, critical thinking & writing abilities.

If AI does it all for you, then you will never develop those crucial capacities.

Professors have key educational goals in mind for their courses and for your development.

Some professors will encourage you to embrace AI so you can learn how to use it as a helpful tool for specific tasks.

Other professors are concerned that AI use may lead you to avoid the (hard) work of developing as a thinker who can address issues intelligently, enlist evidence carefully, and provide a reasoned response to controversies. These profs may limit your AI use in their courses.

There is a limit to its use

If AI can help you to develop as a thinking, achieving student - great.

If it simply helps you avoid educational tasks, even if it produces better results than you can, it is not your friend. It is limiting your education.

So, is writing with AI plagiarism?

While AI is powerful and useful, educators do not want you simply to turn your thinking and assignment submissions over to it, as if it were a servant to run errands for you.

Using AI for writing support isn't necessarily plagiarism if it is just helping with a phrase or sentence here and there. AI can correct your grammar or suggest better language (if your prof suports this use).

But generating paragraphs, sections, or even a full paper is plagiarism. How so? After all, AI isn't a person so it's not really an author. How can I be plagiarizing if I'm not stealing from a real author?

Because plagiarism in its foundation is misrepresentation. You are passing off work that is not yours as if it was yours. Plagiarism is fraud. The source doesn't matter. If your reader thinks you wrote it when you didn't, it's plagiarism.

Use AI intelligently

• Let your professor set the rules.
• Don't let AI devalue your education by

hampering your own critical thinking development.

• Find ways to use AI legitimately.
• Experiment with AI on your own so that you understand what it can and cannot do.

For more, see the TWU AI Policy and Guidelines.

Some explanations

AI is not human

What AI does best

AI makes mistakes

• Generative AI takes your prompts (questions or instructions) and responds in seemingly human ways to create text, images, videos, etc.
• It sources massive amounts of existing information and creates amazing results.

When it lacks data, it can hallucinate (invent "facts") :

• Stating that a person died in the 1980s when that person is still alive (real experience).
• Creating book and article citations for works that don't exist.

Gen AI does not actually "think" or know anything. It pulls its material from an existing information base and doesn't even "understand" the responses it is creating. Its seeming "human" nature is artificial. AI is not a person.

Students & Generative AI