AI and academic skills

Using AI won’t necessarily get you better marks in your assessments.

Your progress and growth in your discipline relies on your engagement with your course content. One of the major benefits of studying at university is the opportunity to develop your thinking skills. If you are too reliant on AI, you may inhibit your critical thinking.

AI tends to produce basic and generic answers. It lacks the critical insight and nuanced thinking that you can produce in your assessments. AI has no insights in to your marking criteria or the expectations of your academic school or faculty. This makes its usefulness questionable.

Using AI can also be as time-consuming as your usual methods of study but could give a less reliable result. For example, you could ask ChatGPT to gather information on a topic of your choice, but it isn’t wise to use this information without rigorously checking its validity. You also need to follow up any references to check that they are real and interpreted accurately.

If you use references that are not genuine, this is a breach of the academic integrity rules of the University. Don’t include any references to information that you have not seen and used yourself in your assessments.

All of this means that your engagement with assessments, course content, reading and learning are just as vital as in a pre-AI world.

Developing study methods and techniques that work for you will help you engage with your learning. These skills can also be vital in your future career. University provides a safe place for you to practice these skills.

You could start by reading the critical thinking webpages or by taking our critical thinking short course.

There are some ways you can use AI tools, including generative AI, to support your study habits. You’ll need to experiment to find out what works for you.

Here are some activities that AI could help with:

• making flashcards or quiz questions to help you revise factual information for an exam
• creating a schedule for your week or a plan to help you meet a project deadline
• converting text to speech, allowing you to listen to long documents instead of reading them
• providing a list of options, alternative ideas, or differing viewpoints to help you clarify your thinking on a topic.

Assistive technology (which does include some AI apps) can also be very helpful, allowing you to access study materials in different formats. This type of technology can be particularly useful if you need disability support.

There are several ethical issues that you should be aware of when considering using AI. It’s down to us as individuals to decide whether the risks and harms outweigh the benefits. Below are some key issues to consider.

Environmental impact

Environmentally, AI systems use huge amounts of energy and water. Tasks performed by generative AI, such as generating images and text, can be energy-intensive as well.

Unlike the energy used by, for example, cars, this is a largely hidden environmental issue. Servers, data centres and cooling systems are generally out of public view.

While the world is still reliant on fossil fuels, this means that AI technologies could have a significant negative impact on our environment and on our efforts to combat climate change.

Privacy and consent

Information is scraped and sourced from across the internet to train AI tools, regardless of whether you have consented to this or not. Pre-AI laws on privacy have not yet caught up with the explosion of the ways in which data is mined and re-used.

Many generative AI tools store your inputs and can use them for further training. This means you should not input any copyrighted material, or sensitive or personal data, to an AI tool, so that you do not compromise anyone’s safety, privacy or intellectual property. For additional protection, we recommend using Microsoft Copilot, because when you are logged in with your University credentials, your inputs and data are protected and are not stored by the AI for training.   

Perpetuating inequality and racism

Studies show that biases and racism are built into AI algorithms, reflecting the discrimination many people experience in society.

This short news article from FutureLearn highlights some of the worrying ways this has transpired in AI and algorithms.

When we re-use images or information created by AI, are we actually reinforcing existing inequalities?

Using AI in the right circumstances can be beneficial, but there are some potential problems  that could have an impact on your effectiveness. Below are a few points to consider.

More time spent fact-checking

It’s very important to fact-check information that you take from AI sources. It is common for AI services to generate ‘phantom citations’ – in other words, sources that do not actually exist! Always check the references that AI tools give you. Make sure they are real and that they are genuinely relevant to your work.

Library Search is one of the best tools for finding reliable, high-quality academic information for your work.

Less understanding of your subject

Interpreting the information that you use is an important life-skill as well as being invaluable at university. If you ask AI to summarise a journal article for you, you may find that that summary does not reflect your interest in the content or accurately reflect what the authors said.

Instead, use the article abstract to assess its usefulness. Use note making techniques to develop your own understanding of the most important aspects of the source and create your own summary. This can help you think about how the information relates to your topic, which enhances your understanding of the subject.

Although it might also be tempting to use AI to transcribe and make notes from your lectures, the University has a policy about recording lectures and other teaching sessions. You should not make any recordings without getting permission to do so.

Lack of academic writing practice

Paraphrasing tools may seem a useful option but using them may lead to several problems, including inaccurate interpretations of text and potential for academic misconduct.

Using a paraphrasing tool will not help you to demonstrate your own understanding of evidence in the way expected in university-level essay writing. For these reasons we strongly advise against using paraphrasing tools.

Instead, read our advice on how to paraphrase effectively and incorporate evidence. There’s also our resource with examples of paragraphs in academic writing and how to show critical analysis with critical writing.

For extra support, you could book a Skills@Library workshop or a confidential 1-2-1 appointment with one of our Learning Advisors.

It is more beneficial to your learning to take part in your taught sessions without using AI. The exceptions to this are if you have been asked to work in this way or have a particular need to do so (eg a reasonable adjustment for a disability).

Using AI in this way may become a barrier to communication and learning in person. Your lecturers are interested in your contributions to the session and want to know what you think. Your unique perspective is shaped by your individual experiences. Sharing your own thoughts and asking questions in class can be a valuable way of getting feedback about your ideas, before you put them into an assessment.

In general, you shouldn’t use AI to write or rewrite for you (unless this is a specific requirement for your assessment).

Sometimes AI tools can help you to break through writer’s block, for example, asking a tool for some bullet points or inspiration to get you started. What is not beneficial is to ask it to generate paragraphs that you then make minor changes to.

The more often you rely on a virtual service to write for you, the less frequently you are practicing the skills that will make it easier to write in the future. The decision-making that goes into independently writing, revising, editing and proofreading contributes to your learning and growth., Doing it yourself also allows you to stay in control of the whole intellectual and creative process.

You could ask AI for general feedback on your writing – just as you would ask for feedback on your writing from your tutor or from a Learning Advisor at Skills@Library. But you should then make your own decisions about whether to accept that feedback and how you will implement it.

Strong writing and clear communication are skills worth developing for your whole life. Skills@Library has lots of advice on writing at university. You can book free and confidential one-to-one appointments with our learning advisors to work on specific skills, online or in person.

For more information and advice about using AI in your studies, we recommend that you discuss your questions with your tutors in your school.

AI can have a wide range of uses in different subject disciplines. What you do with it and indeed whether you use it at all, will depend to some extent on your area of study.

For example, in Computer Science you can study a whole module on AI, whereas in other disciplines it may be of little use and even an obstacle to learning.

Your tutor should tell you how you can use AI for each assessment, using the Gen-AI traffic light system. Check this carefully before you start your work. There's more information on AI and assessments on the Generative AI website.