In this blog post Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha, Paul Wilson, Mahshid Abdoli, Meiko Makita, Emma Stuart and Jonathan Levitt discuss the results of a recent project for UKRI that made recommendations about whether artificial intelligence (AI) could be us…
Category: AI
New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment
AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they s…
tl;dr – AI and the acceleration of research communication
AI is forecast to become increasingly central to many aspects of life and work. The same trends can also be detected in research. Drawing on a recent study of expert perceptions of AI uses in research and taking the recently launched tl;dr tool as a sa…
Facebook, the metaverse and the monetisation of higher education
Following the recent announcement by Facebook of its pivot towards developing a metaverse, John Preston, considers the role it may play in education and the potential it holds for the further monetisation and marketisation of higher education. The met…
Higher Education Science Fictions – How fictional narratives can shape AI futures in the academy
AI is poised to reshape many sectors of our society and economy including higher education. However, the character of this future is often imagined from within particular academic silos or through what technologies can do rather than proven need. In th…
Book Review: A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence by John Zerilli, John Danaher, James Maclaurin, Colin Gavaghan, Alistair Knott, Joy Liddicoat and Merel Noorman
In A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence, John Zerilli, John Danaher, James Maclaurin, Colin Gavaghan, Alistair Knott, Joy Liddicoat and Merel Noorman offer an overview of the moral, political, legal and economic implications of artificial intel…
Can AI be used ethically to assist peer review?
As the rate and volume of academic publications has risen, so too has the pressure on journal editors to quickly find reviewers to assess the quality of academic work. In this context the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to boost productivity …
Should we use AI to make us quicker and more efficient researchers?
Paper Digest is a new research tool that uses artificial intelligence to produce summaries of research papers. In this post David Beer tests out this tool on his own research and reflects on what the increasing penetration of AI into cognition and research tells us about the current state of academic research. When you arrive at Paper Digest you are welcomed […]
Disrupting transcription – How automation is transforming a foundational research method
The transcription of verbal and non-verbal social interactions is a central feature of social research and remains one of the most labour intensive and time consuming parts of many research projects. In this post Daniela Duca explores how the automation of transcription has become standard practice in other industries, such as news media, and considers what this might mean for approaches […]
Death of the author? AI generated books and the production of scientific knowledge
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied to an increasing number of creative tasks from the composition of music, to painting and more recently the creation of academic texts. Reflecting on this development Harry Collins, considers how we might understand AI in the context of academic writing and warns that we should not confuse the work of algorithms with tacit complex […]