A few weeks ago, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic in political science at Macquarie University, wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in which she reported on excessive use of AI chatbots by students to write their essays.
In it, she raised her concern that universities are qualifying lawyers, nurses, financial advisers, engineers and teachers who do not have the essential skills required to perform their roles. If that is the case, the societal consequences are obvious.
Not everybody in the university sector agrees, and the University of Western Sydney’s pro vice-chancellor for quality and integrity, Prof Cath Ellis, wrote an opinion piece in rebuttal.
There was a problem, though. Ellis’s piece itself was written by AI – which was not disclosed to the newspaper. Readers spotted the telltales of AI phraseology, and social media lit up with negative comments.
Ellis defended her opinion piece, saying it was written “with” AI, not “by” AI. From the perspective of the university, Ellis was entitled to use AI as she did. A spokesperson for the university acknowledged that Copilot produced the early drafts and provided editing, structure and language refinement. The university was unapologetic, arguing her use of AI was sophisticated, appropriate and reflected her own thinking, ideas and opinions.
This defence is flawed. Most readers do not read opinion pieces purely for the distilled points of view; for that, a list of dot points would suffice. An opinion piece is an exercise in the art of persuasion. We read to weigh the insights of the writer, to appreciate their prose and ultimately consider their specific points. The writer has power to influence policy and decision-making.
Every reader deserves to be informed about whether what they are reading is written by the presumed author or not. In my case, if I am informed, I would choose not to read an article or a book written by AI. Others might be happy to do so; that is their right. The essential issue is that the reader be informed, in advance.
The next issue is the semantics of what it means for an article to be written or not by a human. To me it is clear. AI can be used to research facts and test ideas, to conduct menial tasks such as spellchecking, grammar checking, formatting tables of content and formatting bibliographies.
But AI must not write the sentences and paragraphs.
These boundaries are what we at my company, Proudly Human, are calling de minimis standards.
Universities should adopt de minimis standards. The standards must be specific rules rather than statements of principle so that there is no argument about what is acceptable and what is not.
Without these conditions, an AI-generated article might motivate somebody else to use AI to create a reply, and so it goes. Pretty soon we will find that human authorship has not merely skidded down a slippery slope but jumped off a cliff into irrelevance.
The SMH and The Age responded by taking down Ellis’s piece and…
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