I teach my students to use AI for their references. Because a lot of them went to school in different places, some of them learned the Chicago way of formatting, while others learned different ways. So when they came to my university, and I said, here we use APA formatting, they struggled with it…I said, let me make it easy for you: AI can do this for you. (A delegate from the United States)

I think AI is helpful for breaking through writer’s block when you’re just stuck. My students sometimes feel really stuck. So if they have a topical assignment, I can say “just try asking a few questions”, and I think it gives them stimulation for new ideas. (A delegate from the United States)

I think one of the ways you can use AI is to show students the fallibility of it, to almost try to get it to say something wrong. I was teaching once, and it told me twelve divided by two was negative one. So that was a choice. And I just showed my students that. (A delegate from the United States)

I wrote down “understanding foreign languages” and “language translation”. I trained my own ChatGPT for my students. I put inside all my working papers, my research papers, theses that I have supervised, and I created my own virtual buddy that my students can use completely. To be honest, it’s a good way to bring them into international research, because for Germans, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult. They want to speak German and do not want to read English. And so, I have my virtual buddy, and it helps my students and me to bring us into research and publish together. (A delegate from Germany)

My students are Arabs in Israel, but we learn together with Jewish people in Hebrew and Arabic. I ask my students to use AI to help them write, speak, and practice in Hebrew, because our language is Arabic, and they are very weak in Hebrew. AI is helpful for them. (A delegate from Israel)

I think the students will struggle with how to write a formal paper in the formal voice. Right now, most students have an idea, they write it, they put it into ChatGPT and ask it to polish the paper, so they can come up with a more polished text. I think that’s the most probable struggle they will have. (A delegate from China working in the United States)

I just have a quick response or question to that. I totally agree that language is the problem for students. You want ChatGPT to convert their language to formal language, but then you’re saying that they don’t know how to write formally, so they still won’t know how to write formally. Then they don’t learn how to write at all. ChatGPT helps them with a job or task, but where are they learning how to write formal academic language? Unless we don’t think that’s important anymore.  (A delegate from the United States)

The difference for those who learned English is that they knew how to write formal English because they were taught the English language. But those who speak English as their native language write in slang. Those of us who went to school in the past didn’t know anything about AI. We learned to write formal English. Especially after COVID-19, many students are struggling with writing. We have to have writing classes for freshmen coming to the university. Without AI, it’s going to be very difficult for a lot of young students. (A delegate from the United States)

My students are community college art students. They’re terrified of writing. They don’t even know how to get started. And so I sit down and do a process with them to help them learn how to use this tool to get over that fear of writing and to learn from the tool how to write well. I think what’s important for us to remember is that they also need to learn how to get over the mediocrity of what AI is giving them. So we need to help them learn that this is the baseline, and they need to do better to succeed. (A delegate from the United States)

For those of us who are a little bit older, how did we learn how to write? Probably most of us learned how to write from reading. Reading is what taught us to write, not school. And the more you read, the better your writing. So imagine yourself as a younger person and put yourself in their frame of reference and understand that what they read is not what we read. That is how they are learning to write. It’s very short, it’s very contractual, it’s the simplification of things. And maybe sometimes the AI systems aren’t necessarily assisting in that regard. (Professor Michael Menchaca, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, United States) 

I wrote the word “discovery”. I think a lot of creative writers, poets, and my students forget that you can do research in these creative fields. It’s not just about your feelings; doing research is not about getting facts, it’s about curiosity. Research means I don’t know what I’ll find. So I want them to do research to discover something they didn’t know, bump into things and play… That process can be tricky with AI because it gives them these pat answers back. When you look to AI for generating ideas, the ideas are mediocre. But it’s hard for them to do this with AI, without the experience of doing this kind of playful discovery and research, because they don’t know about the process. All they care about is “I want to get the product”, “I’ve got to get this research done”, “I need to get this done fast”. And what I want them to do is slow down and make a lot of mistakes in their research, like it’s a good thing to pursue. (A delegate from the United States)

You just triggered something in me, that research is actually our space to really spend more time and actually dwell on things. It’s such an opposite in this world where everything is fast, fast, fast, and it has to be efficient, and we’ve got to get there as quickly as possible. A lot of students are trapped in this mentality and in this academic world. We can go into being just efficient and having our 150 publications a year, or we can go into dwelling on things, taking time, understanding, building connections, building that productivity for the community, and being an asset and serving the people that we value. I feel like that’s a big part of research. (A delegate from Germany working in the United States)

The essence of education is to be able to help students have a successful outcome in life by becoming originators of knowledge. To help students become critical thinkers and originators of knowledge, you have to help them understand the importance of being able to develop a perspective on critical issues in the field. When you observe critical issues, what are you going to do about them? That’s why I believe that research on its own is not valid until it is able to fill a gap and become useful to improve the practice of what we do to develop children. (A delegate from the United States)

I think the most immediate change would be making sure that there is really high-quality and depth of training for faculty in using AI and how to connect it to their specific disciplines, because it is going to be different for everyone. I think that if faculty have deep training, they’re going to be able to better respond to student use and help to make sure that students are using AI in authentic ways. (A delegate from the United States)

We really need to be aware that we can’t go on without AI. Maybe students can use AI much more efficiently and wisely than we do. So when it comes to evaluation, it’s really a tough issue. I myself am a learner of English, and I struggle and use AI when I write papers. So we’re in the same stage as our students are. How to evaluate and assess their work, keeping in mind that they use AI better than we do, is a huge challenge. (A delegate from Japan)

Deep training is a thing, but I think what’s really missing is an ethics class. I can’t predict what students will do with AI. I can’t get ahead of the students. But I can maybe give them a foundation of ethics, whether it’s with AI or with anything else in life, about what’s right and wrong. I give them these tools, which are part of critical thinking or asking questions. Without that dimension, AI is just a thing that I’m gonna have to battle all the time. We need to start having conversations about how to use AI ethically, and not just to manipulate things. In making poems or a story, when is it okay to use it? You say “idea generating” – well, what does that mean? What kind of ideas are you going to get back? And ethically, how are you going to evaluate a 40% AI-generated text, based on your own poems? We’re older, we’ve dealt with ethical questions far longer than students have, period. And that’s what we have to teach them. (A delegate from the United States)

This really is a question of the philosophy of mind: What are thoughts and what is consciousness? What is our engagement with AI in that relationship? What is the truth of something that is trying to be communicated, and what is our truth in trying to express that? And how do we place ourselves in our relationship with AI? I want to connect this to something said at our London conference by Professor Mo Zandi: he said that AI is going to replace the people who don’t know how to use AI. A lot of what we’ve been talking about here is thinking about how to use AI correctly, not just ethically but also in your relationship with it and in relation to the truth. (Professor Grant Black, Chuo University, Japan)