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Artificial Intelligence

AI Ethics

There are a number of ethical considerations with using generative AI. Because AI is "trained" on existing creative material (images, text, video, etc), including copyrighted works in some cases, the owners and copyright holders object. Midjourney in particular has been criticized for its ability to create images "in the style of" a particular artist or that mimic a particular artwork. The results are often very similar to the work of living artists; artists who make their living selling their work. In addition, members of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA both cited concerns about AI being used to replace their members as reasons for striking in 2023. (Writers strike: Why A.I. is such a hot-button issue in Hollywood’s labor battle with SAG-AFTRA | Fortune). Janelle Shane, of the AI Weirdness blog and You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place has written: "In my opinion, the most interesting creative use of large language models is to generate text that's nothing like a human would have written. If your AI is just going to lift human creative output virtually verbatim, you're not only shortchanging the humans you could have hired to write similar things, but also plagiarizing the original humans from the training data" (23 Aug 2023).

You should always discuss your plans to use AI with your instructor and cite it in any submitted work. Here are some examples of how AI could be used in academic work:

  • LLM chatbots like ChatGPT might be a useful way to get a quick overview on a topic. As with Wikipedia, we'd recommend that you follow references and check the source. Remember, LLMs can produce credible sounding yet incorrect content, or create references to sources that don't exist. 
  • You could use an LLM to refine the style or composition of (non-assessed) writing. This can be helpful for work or professional contexts such as social media posts or sending emails.
  • To summarise a longer document
  • To brainstorm ideas
  • To generate keywords for searches