Across India’s universities, professors are reporting an unusual phenomenon: assignments submitted are flawless, paragraphs flow logically, phrases and arguments are grammatically correct but oddly disconnected.
The emergence of high-quality Artificial Intelligence-powered services such as ChatGPT, Bard and Co-pilot has altered the production of academic knowledge. In higher education, AI has become a secret collaborator, producing essays that could be mistaken for having been written by humans. By the time educational institutions started discussing whether AI should be incorporated into classrooms, students had long mastered their use.
There are obvious reasons for this quick adoption. Students who have to work or take care of families use AI to balance academic assignments with their life’s responsibilities. For international students or those with learning disabilities, it helps overcome language barriers. Even faculty depend on it to write emails, to write the assignment descriptions and create research summaries.
AI has been integrated into the writing process since it speeds up tasks.
This convenience complicates the picture. When writing skills are enhanced or outsourced, what should students be credited for? When an argument is produced by machines rather than the minds of a student, what are teachers testing? With AI helping smoothen out thought processes, students are avoiding the struggle, confusion and intellectual discomfort that lead to real learning.
It is now not a question of whether students use AI, but the manner in which they do so and whether they understand what is lost or distorted in the process. In academia, writing reflects thinking: a well-written sentence indicates a well-founded idea. For teachers, a student’s writing is a window into a mind in conflict with complexity. AI polishes such early intellectual work by students but undermines their intellectual muscles.
Invisible helper
The use of AI tools in the knowledge-building academic field hurts transparency, intellectual integrity and the authenticity of scholarship work.
It raises profound questions about conventional norms of authorship and accountability. AI is increasingly being used as a co-author, without attributing the text, summaries or analyses it generates to a machine.
Academic ethical codes say that being an author entails holding intellectual responsibility for the work produced. But the terms of use of most AI programmes explicitly disavow any responsibility for the content they produce.
Institutions have responded by focusing on detection and preventing the misuse of AI. But this is futile, even counterproductive.
Educational institutions must give up the fantasy that AI can be outlawed. Rather, it is the institutions that must teach AI literacy: how to use it responsibly, how the content generated can be viewed critically, how to identify inaccuracies and how students can learn the difference between assistance and outsourcing. Students must be taught that the good writers employ tools without giving up their voice.
Second, universities should implement transparency, where students report how and when they used AI in the course of their work, like using a source. Rather than censure, institutions should develop a culture in which a clear disclosure of AI assistance becomes part of normal scholarly practice, just like a disclosure of research or editing assistance. This increases accountability and academic integrity and makes the peer assessment informed.
Third, evaluations should be changed. Instead of only grading final papers, instructors can mark drafts, notes, in-class writing, oral viva, and collaborative discussions, the kinds of processes that AI replicates poorly. This does not disqualify AI, but grounds learning in the thought of human beings.
Finally, faculty require institutional aid. It is not realistic to expect professors to navigate AI ethics, redesign their assignments, and address new forms of academic integrity without training. There must be professional development in universities at the same level that this technological change takes place.
AI is changing the concept of learning itself. The new ghostwriters are here to stay. By being open and providing advice and the ability to re-evaluate past practices, universities can use AI as a means to more profound education.
Transparency, fairness and inculcating responsibility can help academia preserve the integrity and sustainability of ethical knowledge creation under the AI era.
Anuradha PS and Divyashree are professors at Christ University & Alliance University, Bengaluru.
