AI will help staff and students, research and education to flourish

I have spent my entire professional life researching artificial intelligence (AI). Now that I’m a vice-chancellor, I’m frequently asked about AI’s likely impact on universities – particularly since the development of powerful chatbots such as ChatGPT brought home to everyone how quickly the field is advancing. Although I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, I have a few thoughts.

AI is transforming society: we already see significant impacts on the way we live, work and play. This will become ever more pronounced as the technology improves and we think of more creative ways to deploy it. When I give talks on AI, I often enliven proceedings by challenging the audience to shout out an area or topic for which I can’t name a related AI application. I have yet to be stumped, despite some fairly wild suggestions.

However, I don’t believe AI will dominate the world or take all our jobs. AI systems will be most effective when they work in partnership with humans, capitalising on the strengths of both. With this perspective in mind, let me turn to universities in particular.

I believe that, ultimately, AI will transform the way we undertake research, educate students and run our institutions. Early glimpses of this are evident today, but we have only just started to scratch the surface. 

In terms of research, there is exciting activity in all areas of academic endeavour, from exploring the rights of sentient machines to using novel computational techniques to discover new drugs and materials. These are examples of, respectively, profound new research questions and fundamentally new approaches to solving complex problems. It is important to emphasise that the need and ability to engage with these is absolutely not confined to STEM subjects, nor to academics with STEM backgrounds. All research disciplines will be influenced by AI, and many will be powered by it.

In terms of education, there has long been the tantalising promise that AI will personalise the learning experience, tracking individuals’ progress and presenting content and assignments tailored to their particular learning styles and abilities. This truly bespoke offering would operate at a scale far beyond that available at any university today and would help to meet the increasingly diverse needs of today’s cohorts – without, I hope, losing the inspiration and connection that lies at the heart of a high-quality university education and which only human educators can provide.

Of course, AI also raises profound questions about assessment. ChatGPT can produce highly credible essays, answers to assignments, computer programs and even magazine articles – although not this one, obviously. We cannot and should not simply ban the use of such systems. Rather, we need to think carefully about how they can enhance the work of all of us, including students; examples include generating ideas, summarising significant bodies of work and critiquing initial drafts. That said, we need to ensure that assignments and assessments still require critical thinking, independent research and understanding that cannot be wholly outsourced to a chatbot.

For educators, AI systems can aggregate course feedback and analysis in real time. This will give us a reliable, objective way to identify the topics and concepts that students find most challenging without having to wait until after exams or being biased by those who are most vocal.

Possibly the least explored question is how AI can improve the way universities operate. In many ways, universities are just like other large institutions, so AI advances in areas such as HR, finance and marketing should naturally flow into them through standard products and services. Imagine a university in which data is only inputted once, is not lost and is joined up to provide valuable services. AI could finally make universities the modern, digitally powered institutions they should be.

What’s more interesting, however, is AI’s impact on functions specific to universities. Turning first to students, I see significant opportunities for AI assistants to amplify (human) personal tutors by identifying relevant course options based on the millions of data points generated by their individualised learning journeys. AI could also highlight and schedule interesting extra-curricular activities and opportunities, as well as keeping an eye on mental health and well-being.

For staff, AI could automate the routine administrative tasks that we all spend too much time on (think meeting-scheduling, claiming expenses, form-filling). It could also help discover and summarise relevant educational material and suggest collaborations with relevant researchers working in adjacent or complementary fields.

It is true that significant hurdles remain to be overcome. Most AI systems need lots of data, raising issues of privacy, data ownership, copyright, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and bias. These are all genuine showstoppers if handled incorrectly. In addition, most AI systems cannot readily explain why they made a particular decision, and chatbots in particular are prone to giving convincing but entirely incorrect answers. Finally, AI systems are poor at social interactions. They just don’t know how to be effective collaborators, good team players or robust challengers of human decisions. The human still has to accommodate the foibles of the machine.

Nevertheless, if we embrace the opportunities and work in partnership, AI will help staff and students, research and education to flourish. As ChatGPT itself puts it: “If used wisely, [AI] will make universities more effective, rewarding and inclusive for everybody.”

Nick Jennings is vice-chancellor and president of Loughborough University.