What is GenAI?
Generative AI (or GenAI) is the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Unlike traditional AI that simply sorts data or makes predictions, GenAI actually creates new content: essays, images, code, music even videos. This is called multi modal content. It learns patterns from extremely large digital datasets and then generates original outputs based on what you ask it to do (called prompting).
Since these tools became publicly available in late 2022, they've sparked a fundamental shift in how we think about authorship, learning, and academic integrity. Educators everywhere have been trying to figure out what this means, as this new world offers both significant challenges and opportunities for all aspects of education.
The Educational Opportunities
The instinctive response for many is to view GenAI as just a threat to traditional assessment. There are of course significant challenges in ensuring assessment integrity and validity but the technology is also a powerful teaching tool. Below are some examples of what else it can do:
- Personalised Learning at Scale: GenAI can adapt to each student's learning style, providing instant feedback and generating practice questions tailored to where they're struggling. When used effectively, it opens up a new range of teaching supports for students.
- Breaking Down Barriers: GenAI can help facilitate collaborative learning when language and / or culture barriers may be challenging for both student and educator.
- Supporting Critical Thinking: Gen AI tools can be set up and shared with students to engage in a Socratic style of questioning and dialogue thereby supporting the development of critical thinking skills for students.
- Real-World Applications: The ability to rapidly produce discipline specific case studies, sample data, problem based assignments, mock interviews, sophisticated project briefs and other real world applications opens up a whole world of possibilities for educators.
- Creative Potential: Gen AI reduces the barrier to learning, and fundamentally allows anyone produce creative content that previously required extensive training or skill. This democratises learning and the creative potential for all.
The Challenges
Despite the potential, GenAI comes with significant limitations.
Some of the problems include:
- Hallucinations: GenAI can confidently present completely fabricated information, including fake citations that look entirely legitimate.
- Hidden Sources: Some of these systems don't disclose where their information comes from, making it impossible to verify reliability, veracity, or bias.
- Authoritative Appearance: The outputs sound professional and convincing, which makes the errors even more damaging.
- Ethics: Some of the information used to train Gen AI platforms has been extracted from copyright sources without permission leading to large scale legal disputes.
- Bias: Some of the training data reflects many of the inherent human biases that we have been guilty of as a society. In some cases, the Gen AI outputs amplify these biases.
- Environment: The requirement for vast energy resources and significant water use in data centres places an unrealistic burden on the planet. Urgent solutions are needed to address this aspect of Gen AI.
- Cognitive offloading: Students who grow more dependent on these tools to produce rapid plausible sounding outputs will impede their own innate learning skills and harm their graduate development.
Finding the Balance
The challenge for everyone is to balance the opportunities with integrity. We need to embrace the benefits without abandoning what makes higher education valuable in the first place. Human centred education is still the most valuable asset we have, and we need to adopt the benefits afforded by this new technology without losing our presence and value in the classroom.
The goal isn't to resist GenAI or embrace it uncritically. It's to figure out how to integrate these tools thoughtfully, ensuring students develop the judgment, creativity, and critical thinking skills they'll need to thrive in an AI-augmented world. This is a very fast moving area in education and will require everyone to continually re-evaluate what best practice looks like in their own disciplines.
The National Forum for the Enhancement of Learning has recently produced a significant report into sectoral perspectives in Ireland which provides excellent advice and insights into many areas relevant to Gen AI and Higher Education in Ireland. These include practical tips for educators, considerations for assessment redesign, AI literacy, ethical use and inclusion / equity concerns among others.