AI in the Academic Setting

The following represent concerns that have been discussed in academic literature and the news media and are not exhaustive.  And, there are some out there that are actively refusing to use it at all.  

• Accuracy:
  • Read this September 2024 report from NewsGuard
  • AI use in legal cases
• Bias:
  • ChatGPT was trained with text and code from the internet and by human feedback, a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.  Therefore, if any of the information initially used to train it was biased and or feedback by the ChatGPT users shows bias, ChatGPT will "learn" that bias.  This blog post explores more of where the bias comes from.
  • Bias in models used in medicine
  • Political bias in large language models
• Copyright and Licensing
  • Content produced by Artificial Intelligence can not be granted copyright protection.  The US Copyright Office stipulates that copyrighted material must have a human author, and prompting an AI tool to create content does not count as human authorship.  Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law by the Congressional Research Service from September 2023 explains the preliminary thoughts.
  • AI has sent copyright laws into chaos
  • Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US
  • The US Copyright Office is issuing a Report in several Parts analyzing the issues, which will be published as they are completed.
    • On July 31, 2024, the Office published Part 1 of the Report, which addresses the topic of digital replicas.
    • On January 29, 2025, the Office published Part 2 of the report, which address the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI.
    • On May 11, 2025, the office released the pre-publication version of Part 3 of the report.  The current leader of the excecutive branch of the US government, fired the Copyright Office head the next day.
  • Wikimedia-Wikilegal/Copyright Analysis of ChatGPT
  • Some publishers are licensing scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs: Licensing Agreement Tracker
  • Copyright Clearance Center:  AI, Copyright, and Licensing
• Energy consumption/Environmental impact
  • The carbon footprint of artificial intelligence
  • Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
  • AI's environmental impact will threaten its own supply chain
  • The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans (February 2024)
  • Artificial intelligence's thirst for electricity
  • "AI supercomputers consist of tens of thousands of AI chips connected with high-bandwidth networking equipment and consume up to dozens of megawatts of power—equivalent to tens of thousands of U.S. households." Sastry, G., Heim, L., Belfield, H., Anderljung, M., Brundage, M., Hazell, J., O’Keefe, C., Hadfield, G. K., Ngo, R., Pilz, K., Gor, G., Bluemke, E., Shoker, S., Egan, J., Trager, R. F., Avin, S., Weller, A., Bengio, Y., & Coyle, D. (2024). Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (arXiv:2402.08797). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08797
  • A Bottle of Water Per Email
  • AI's power requirements under exponential growth (RAND report, January 28, 2025)
  • We did the math on AI's energy footprint (MIT Technology Review, May 2025)
• Equity
  • Toward ethical and equitable AI in higher education
  • These women tried to warn us about AI
  • Algorithmic Justice League
• Ethics
  • How thousands of 'overworked underpaid' humans train Google's AI to seem smart (2025)
  • The ethics of ChatGPT- Exploring the ethical issues of an emerging technology
  • In AI arms race, ethics may be the first casualty
  • Teaching AI Ethics
  • Millions of workers are training AI models for pennies (may require a subscription)
• Governmental regulation/oversight of AI 
  • The European Union has taken this on: EU AI Act
  • California AI safety bill
  • Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee (US Congress): Innovation with Integrity: Examining the risks and benefits of AI chatbots
• Inadvertent plagiarism by the human user (opinion piece from IEEE)
• Overview of multiple concerns about the technology
  • On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
  • Anatomy of an AI System
• Peer Review Integrity
• Privacy issues: 
  • As with any application/software, be aware of how they collect and use your data and remember they can change their policies at any time.
  • User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers’ Privacy Policies (September 2025)
  • Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations were searchable on Google (subscription to 404 Media required to read)
  • Have I been trained? Search your work in popular AI training datasets
  • For more general information on AI and privacy see the Privacy and AI Governance Report from IAPP
  • ChatGPT bug leaked users' conversation histories (March 2023)
  • Don't tell anything to a chatbot you want to keep private (April 2023)
  • Whoops, Samsung workers accidentally leaked trade secrets via chatGPT (April 2023)
  • Will ChatGPT revolutionize surveillance? (April 2023)
• Possible effects on human decision making
• Reproducibility: the same prompt can generate different content so if using something like chatGPT for a methodology in research, it may not be replicable.

The short video below from the University of Maryland libraries summarizes the main concerns quite well.

Currently, there are no applications or programs that can definitively evaluate or alert you if the content you are reading or seeing was created by an AI like ChatGPT.  There are a few out there that tell you the probability that the content was ChapGPT created such as the app GPTZero or Originality.ai.  These types of tools should not be used to unequivocally accuse someone of AI use and they have inherent biases.  

Sensity AI has come up with an AI-powered deepfake detector. ScamAI can evaluate videos, images, voice, and text.  AI or Not is a tool for image identification.  GeoConfirmed geolocates and verifies visual content (photos, videos) particularly in regard to global events. Academi-AI monitors suspected undeclared AI usage in the academic literature.  MIPPIA claims to detect AI plagiarsim in music.

"As the technology stands today, it's safest to avoid automated AI detection tools completely.  As of now, AI writing is undetectable and likely to remain so," frequent AI analyst and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick told Ars in July. 'AI detectors have high false positive rates, and they should not be used as a result.'" Edwards, B. (2023, September 8). OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/

As the large language models and image generators "learn" more by interacting with human users, it will become increasingly difficult for humans to detect AI content.  This company, Undetectable AI, helps you humanize something you've created using AI.  These articles give some more information on this topic:

• New research integrity AI tool added to Springer Nature's growing portfolio
• Springer Nature unveils two new AI tools to protect research integrity
• OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don't work
• Can AI Generated Text Be Reliably Detected?
• 5 Ways to Detect Text Written by ChatGPT and Other AI Tools
• How to tell if a photo is an AI-generated fake
• Can Humans Detect Text by AI Chatbot GPT?

There has also been some exploration into "watermarking" AI output (images, video, text).  Read more about it in the articles below.

• There's a fix for AI generated essays.  Why aren't we using it?
• AI watermarking: How it works, applications, challenges

View the short video below from the University of British Columbia Chapman Learning Commons for a quick overview of how and why to evaluate generative AI.