‘The exciting AI adventure’: reflections on the ethical use of generative AI in academic writing

Abstract

Generative AI is rapidly and radically changing reading and writing practices and compelling HEIs to adopt new strategies for promoting academic integrity and incorporating emergent literacy-enhancing technologies into curriculum delivery. In his presentation, Lee-Price critically reflected on two academic writing workshops intended to develop undergraduates’ understanding of academic integrity and demonstrate a constructive and critical use of AI in academic work. The workshops were designed with the aid of ChatGPT, with one of them incorporating a paraphrasing activity using QuillBot.

Lee-Price explored how practitioners can work with AI in a way that embraces ALDinHE’s (2023) five values of Learning Development: in particular, supporting staff and students to ‘make sense of’ HE and foster ‘critical pedagogy’. In his analysis of the design and delivery of the workshops, Lee-Price adopted an academic literacies approach that encourages ‘alternative ways of meaning making in academia […] by considering the resources that (student) writers bring to the academy’ (Lillis and Scott, 2007, p.13). He also drew on the concept of ‘slow reading’, which resists an emphasis on efficiency and the associated view of reading as information extraction, promoting instead ‘an ethical relation of openness with the otherness, ambiguity and strangeness of the text, and how this openness to intensity and intimacy can be transformative’ (Walker, 2017, p.xx). Themes explored included co-creation, lived experience, and ethical responsibility. Lee-Price proposed that Learning Developers should proactively support their institutions in engaging innovatively with the practical, pedagogical, and ethical challenges (and opportunities!) arising from AI.