22.12.2024
Is it advisable to use artificial intelligence, does it do harm or provide help?
On December 20, as part of the forum “Digitalization and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Theories, Practices, Agents”, a strategic session “Artificial Intelligence in the Humanities: Ethical Limits and Educational Practices” was held, dedicated to current issues of the development and application of artificial intelligence methods in the field of education.
"There is no uniform practice and understanding in the world of the extent to which students can be allowed to use artificial intelligence. My opinion is that this must definitely be done. But then it is important to set the limits of what is permissible," said Olga Pavlenko, Vice-Rector for Research, in her presentation “Artificial Intelligence in Academic Publications: Experience of Russian and Foreign Universities”.
To allow or prohibit the use of AI in education is a question that is still under debate. According to Olga Pavlenko, the enormous possibilities and unconditional advantages of using neural networks are obvious. Firstly, it is the editing of texts and high-quality machine translation. Secondly, artificial intelligence opens up the possibilities of bibliographic search. However, in addition to the advantages, there is also such a phenomenon as "system hallucination". According to a last year's study by “Nature”, it was found that for each of the academic topics, the system fabricated from 18% to 55% of the titles of monographs and bibliographic descriptions. This indicates the need for selection and rechecking. In addition, psychologists involved in higher education psychology believe that with the active use of AI, students' ability to think and research critically will atrophy, and consumer perception of information will be formed. As Olga Pavlenko notes, there are no uniform, generally admissible criteria for acceptable work with neural networks; each university sets its own limits for what is permitted. For example, today, when writing any academic work, many universities and scientific journals require the author to highlight the passages generated using AI, the neural network model used for generation, the date of access, and the purpose for which the machine-generated text was added to the original text.
The participants also discussed the consequences of the mass introduction of artificial intelligence technologies in the academic process, the issue of authorship and copyright, as well as the areas in which the use of artificial intelligence technologies has the greatest potential. Also, during his presentation on the prospects for using artificial intelligence in media monitoring, Alexei Leonov, Director of the Business Development Department of the Interfax Group, shared with students three main factors for developing their own information resources.
