The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education has grown rapidly since the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022. Students now use AI for various academic purposes, from completing assignments and conducting literature reviews to creating presentations. While this phenomenon offers significant opportunities to enhance productivity, it also raises profound questions about ethics and academic integrity.
Dr. Michał Lemański, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing at WU Vienna, highlighted this phenomenon. He explained that a major turning point in education came in December 2022, shortly after the release of ChatGPT version 3.
“I think that was the moment when many people realized its power and possibilities. Not long after that, ambitious students and professionals began using it extensively and experimenting with it,” he said during the FEB UGM Podcast titled “AI di Kampus: Smart Learning atau Academic Cheating?”
He added that AI has now evolved far beyond generative AI. Various digital assistants are becoming increasingly personalized because they can work directly with users’ data. According to him, many people use AI-powered functions without even realizing it, as the technology has already been integrated into everyday search engines and word-processing applications.
Lemański highlighted two major issues that frequently arise in the use of AI on campus. The first is hallucination, in which AI generates answers that appear plausible but are actually incorrect. He has even encountered PhD students and several academics submitting work containing references to journal articles that never existed, fabricated by AI systems.
The second issue concerns copyright, particularly when students upload paywalled papers to large language models to use as references or training material. According to him, such practices may violate the law because publishers hold commercial rights over these works.
“Some content is not freely available because publishers bear the costs of processing, storing, publishing, and maintaining papers on servers. There are also substantial costs associated with editing. If students take research publications that are behind a paywall and upload them to a large language model to be used as training data, that is illegal in many countries,” he explained.
He emphasized that ethical awareness in the use of AI cannot develop without individual effort by its users. In addition, many students are unaware that uploading lecture materials to AI systems also involves intellectual property belonging to lecturers and other students.
On the other hand, Lemański sees AI as offering significant opportunities to improve student productivity, particularly for assignments that were previously impossible to complete due to financial and time constraints. According to him, this improvement is most apparent when students are given genuinely new types of assignments.
“For example, assigning students to develop a new marketing strategy and social media content, complete with graphics, used to be impossible without a large budget. Now it is possible, and students can accomplish it in about a month,” he said.
Similar practices are also taking place in university classes, where students help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) develop marketing content using AI because of the SMEs’ limited budgets. Lemański described this as a real-world example of the social benefits that AI technology can bring to communities.
Nevertheless, Lemański warned of the risks facing certain professions, such as graphic designers and translators, who are now under significant pressure from automation. He questioned what opportunities for career transition would be available to people whose skills are increasingly being replaced by machines.
Amid these changes, Lemański also shared his experience of teaching a class at his university. The classroom was deliberately designed without screens or digital devices, relying solely on a whiteboard and traditional writing tools. He noted that students’ responses to the class exceeded his expectations, particularly in social interaction, which is less common in conventional digital classrooms.
Lemański stressed that the fundamental principles of ethics in the use of AI remain the same, even as the context continues to evolve. He encouraged lecturers and students to continuously learn and adapt to this new technology responsibly, without sacrificing human values.
“We know the principles of ethics, we know what works, we need to learn more about both the benefits and the dangers, and we also need to apply ethical principles to everything we do and remain aware of the ethical dimensions of our decisions. That is very important,” he concluded.
Report: Dwi Zhafirah Meiliani
Editor: Kurnia Ekaptiningrum
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