Universities shifting towards AI use – what do the students think?
Falmouth and Exeter University students Emma and Charlotte both shared the ways they both use AI in their work and whether or not they believe them to be ethical.
A hot topic currently is the ways universities allow AI in certain use cases. Second year Falmouth Games Development student Emma and second year Exeter Law & Business student Charlotte both spoke about how they use AI differently and what software they find to be most beneficial.
AI usage at university
Emma said: “For my university work I mainly use Anara which is used for finding specific pieces of academic papers which I use to save time in my essays, especially for last-minute referencing.”
There are many different types of AI platforms now that do more than just, to varying degrees of success, write essays for you. Platforms such as Anara can be used to help find specific parts of articles and papers to give students the exact information they need and save huge amounts of time when producing written work.
“I can just upload a source and ask it to give me details on the specific talking points I need to write about”
These types of tools are seen as one of the best AI tools for papers and essays without artificially doing the work for you.
Charlotte uses AI for her Business work slightly differently saying: “I use ChatGPT sometimes to come up with creative business names, logo ideas or missions as part of coursework when I’m actually creating a business.”
Among a few students across both universities, AI seems to be used primarily to save time or to brainstorm ideas to support coursework.
Charlotte using AI on Falmouth Campus
Emma went on to say that “I also use Grammarly at the end of my essays just to help me with my spelling, punctuation and grammar.”
The growing popularity of AI tools
AI tools also seem to prove useful for students to ensure that their work is grammatically correct and likely proves extremely helpful to students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia to avoid being marked down for grammar and spelling mistakes that they cannot entirely help.
However, AI can also slip up in cases as Charlotte states that: “I don’t like using AI for my law assignments as it has a habit of creating fake statute and case law.”
AI isn’t always the most reliable when it comes to providing sources and cases for topics like law, as engines such as ChatGPT do tend to create fictional cases a lot of the time in response to different prompts from users. This makes it far less reliable to gain factual information from, pushing engines including and similar to ChatGPT as tools to inspire ideas as opposed to gathering facts.
ChatGPT generating a response from a given prompt
In some cases, it seems that standard research can prove to be more efficient than using AI to research topics. Charlotte said that “It’s just quicker most of the time to just research the law rather than using AI.”
AI really does seem to be pushing in the direction of creative idea generation alongside speeding up the research process, whilst still falling short of providing accurate sources. Universities such as Falmouth and Exeter should lean it to its benefits and ensure integrity by giving basic training to student alumni about what AI is best for as of present.