The academic world has been struggling with “how to handle AI” for some time, an Australian researcher has told Mediaweek.
“AI has become better at directing you to the sources it gets its answers from, but if you just copied and pasted its results, you might be in violation of some copyrights.
“But it can also be useful when you input your own data and it helps you structure a report.”
The researcher, whose papers have appeared in some of the major publications in their field but did not want to appear to be biased, made the comments to Mediaweek in response to recent news of an academic’s work being pulled from the Sydney Morning Herald for using AI.
Western Sydney University’s pro vice-chancellor for quality and integrity, Prof Cath Ellis, wrote an opinion piece warning students to “do the work” and avoid depending on AI. When it was alerted to a potential issue by other academics, the SMH removed the “unacceptable” article from its website.
Ellis’s story had been responding to a piece from the academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who said she warned her stepdaughter that students were “being graded on who can write the best AI prompts”.
The SMH reports that Moore-Gilbert read Ellis’s story, and her suspicions about AI usage were aroused “by the overuse of short, declarative sentences such as: ‘It is not this. It is that.’
“She also noticed a large amount of unnecessary jargon that did not make sense when it was drilled down.
“For instance, the repetition of ‘to assure learning’ or ‘artefact’ to me seemed odd choices of words in the context they were used.”
The Guardian now reports that Ellis’s article, “when submitted to AI-detector service Pangram, came up as AI-generated.”
It added, “In response to questions from Guardian Australia, the university said Ellis had used AI in writing the column.”
The university’s spokesperson confirmed that “To write her opinion article, Prof. Ellis uploaded 40,000 words of her own original materials into a Copilot Large Language Model (LLM). The model summarised her extensive base of knowledge, providing prompts.
“This was the basis of the early drafts, reflecting Prof. Ellis’s own thinking, ideas and opinions built up over more than a decade of dedicated work as a global leader in this field.”
They added, “Programs like Pangram can detect AI use, but they cannot determine whether that use was appropriate or inappropriate,” the spokesperson said. “The University believes the AI use in this case was appropriate.”
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But there were others signs of AI usage, Moore-Gilbert said; her suspicions were raised by the overuse of short, declarative sentences such as: “It is not this. It is that.” She also noticed a large amount of unnecessary jargon that did not make sense when it was drilled down.
The SMH reports that Ellis clarified, “It was written with AI, and there’s a really big difference there.”
Mediaweek‘s own academic source said, “It seems that the real issue was that the use of AI in any form was not declared.
“It’s common practice everywhere on the internet to say ‘AI was used to assist in the creation of this article’, or a similar disclaimer, to avoid this exact scenario – and not just in academic circles.
“Such disclaimers can make a huge difference to the credibility of any content, and its author.”
Feature image: An image of Western Sydney university from their Instagram page.