Glasgow Caledonian University lecturer says department considering changing course requirements amid AI fears
Could this image have been AI generated?
A computing and engineering lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University has said his department is looking at making changes to courses with creative components to deter the use of artificial intelligence software.
It comes after the university updated its academic guidance on cheating to include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of the May exam period which kicked off on Tuesday.
A student-made video has also been released on the university’s social media channels and included as part of their “Don’t Cheat Yourself” advice page.
It warns that students could face disciplinary action, or even expulsion, if caught submitting AI generated content as university coursework.
Steven Anderson, a lecturer at the university’s School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment, said academic institutions are having to consider new ways to deal with issues of cheating.
He said: “It’s certainly a problem in my area. I work in computer games and from the creative side AI is getting much better at creating visual content.
“People claiming that a nice piece of art is something they’ve created when it’s actually been generated by an AI. That is a huge problem.
“We base our offers to students once they apply on a visual portfolio of students artwork so obviously if it was created by AI that could lead us to lots of problems.
“Whilst we embrace the technology as well as we like to, we have to put up some defences to identify what’s AI and what’s not AI.”
Mr Anderson said his department is looking at potentially bringing in requirements for students to submit staged progress of their work, asking them to upload their work in progress on a weekly basis.
This is something which would not be possible for AI-generated works which have been created instantaneously from just a user’s request.
This would protect against the use of art generators such as Bing Image Creator, which is powered by software developed by American research laboratory OpenAI.
He added: “We don’t want to say you can’t use AI because I think it’s a great research tool, it’s great for inspiration, it’s great for creating variations of a concept. You can really quickly get AI to change the colour of something to blue of vary the background. You can generate multiple variations of the same concept.
“It’s that fine line between what is a student’s creative input and what is AI generated.”
The Chat GPT artificial intelligence website, also developed by OpenAI, is one of the main culprits being pointed to as a concern in the world of higher education.
As well as catalysing a storm of viral videos online, the AI has the ability to create passable academic essays at the mere request of a uses, a process which bypasses the plagiarism checking software typically used by universities.
Mr Anderson added that the “onus should be on the companies” developing AI software to put safeguards in place to protect against its implications on academic integrity.
He said: “I shouldn’t spend two hours talking to an AI specialist about how I prevent my students from plagiarising using the system but I’ve got to consider that, so we have group meetings, departmental meetings, we have meetings at the coffee shop all saying ‘this is a concern, how do we stop it, how do we use it, how do we check it?’
“It gets to that stage where the creators don’t know how people are going to use these systems and that’s a bit of a lack of foresight for people who are supposed to be very intelligent, very clever at predicting things.”
