Educational institutions find themselves suddenly confronted with a fork in the road.
Armin Alimardani has blue hair, is fresh faced, wears a smart watch and describes himself as “a tech enthusiast”.
The Western Sydney University senior lecturer in law and technology has been studying and experimenting with AI for years – he is speaking from Palermo in Italy, where he is attending a series of university workshops on the technology. Alimardani finds this talk “extremely concerning”.
Alimardani’s is among several universities in Australia that allow staff to use AI in marking assessments and giving students feedback.
Though limited, fellow critics say such use of AI risks universities replacing the work of human academics on campuses with algorithms in datacentres – and that it could create a so-called “slop-cycle”, in which students submit AI generated assignments that academics mark with AI.
The University of Newcastle, also in New South Wales, Deakin University and RMIT in Victoria and South Australia’s University of Adelaide all give similar allowances to WSU. Newcastle, for example, gives students the right to opt out and Deakin says staff can use AI to “improve efficiency and support assessment and administrative activities” but not “assign grades”.
Imagine 100 academics are given an AI marking tool but told to verify its assessments, Alimardani says.
Which may explain several high-ranking universities draw the line at using generative AI in marking, despite enthusiastically allowing it in other aspects of the classroom.
Similar jargon was deployed by the Queensland University of Technology in an email sent to staff in late August advising them of its “assessment uplift project”.