丁香园AV

Graduate supervisors, have you discussed Artificial Intelligence (AI) with your students? Have you made an agreement with how your graduate students should use it in their research and/or writing? 

The conversations around the use of AI are not always easy, especially as the availability of free and low-cost, easy to use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) abounds. It鈥檚 also hard to stay on top of all the products available at our fingertips. GenAI is changing the way faculty members and students are conducting and writing their research.

Graduate Studies鈥� Associate Dean, Policy + Curriculum, Dr. Pamela Stern, in collaboration with Master of Arts in International Studies (MAIS) student, Laila Shaheen, developed a self-paced canvas course to help supervisors navigate the use of GenAI tools in academic research. 

AI For Graduate Supervisors helps graduate supervisors to better understand the landscape of GenAI to help their graduate students make informed decisions about their use for research and writing. 

Says Stern, 鈥淚t can be tempting for students to lean into using Gen AI tools as there are many benefits. These research tools can create credible literature reviews, code narrative data, write computer code, and produce professional looking graphics. GenAI tools are enabling new forms of inquiry and allowing research to be scaled up in ways that were not previously feasible.鈥�

While the rewards of GenAI tools can make using them tempting, there are also serious risks for researchers and their data. These risks include:鈥�

• the inadvertent exposure of proprietary, sensitive, and confidential data;鈥�
• loss of control of intellectual property;鈥�
• unintentional plagiarism; and鈥�
• questions about the intellectual rigor of our students鈥� theses.  

takes supervisors on a two-hour overview of GenAI by covering the following topics:

• What are generative AI tools? How are they related to the broader field of machine learning and artificial intelligence?鈥�
• How is generative AI trained to provide responses to queries? Where does the training data come from? What do AI tools do with data or other materials that users input?鈥�
• What are some of the ways that third-party and commercial GenAI tools can support academic research at its different stages from initial ideation through dissemination? What are the risks posed by the adoption of AI tools for academics鈥�?
• How can researchers evaluate AI tools for effectiveness and safety?鈥�
• What are the policies of research granting agencies and major academic publishers about the use of AI tools? What鈥檚 happening at other Canadian universities?鈥�
• How to begin conversations with graduate student researchers about appropriate uses of AI tools in thesis research and publication?

Stern hopes this course will enable 丁香园AV faculty members who supervise graduate students to be comfortable discussing how and when their students may use GenAI in their research and writing.

鈥淭here is no single way to address the use of GenAI in research and writing; norms are still in flux and each discipline will develop different standards. What we hope, that in providing this course, 丁香园AV faculty members will be better equipped to understand the landscape of GenAI, discuss when it鈥檚 ok or beneficial to use it, define when and why it鈥檚 not ok to use it, and create a plan for how to disclose its use in a student鈥檚 research,鈥� says Stern.