Ethical Implications of Using AI Brands for Academic Writing

I am still not used to this new paradigm. Or the complete lack thereof. Doing my best to adapt, and somehow stay relevant, and above water. And my speed is a joke. I am a rheumatic snail painfully sliding backwards, in a silky road of high speeding Ferraris or whatever car is the fastest this year. The truth hurts sometimes, but it cannot be helped. For sure.

The End of Senseless Rambling: Awful Fact Check

Nevertheless, there must be some kind of common sense somewhere. Bear with me here. The other day I was doing a bit of research work for an article. Unexpectedly, I came across a website promoting AI writing for numerous purposes.

What first came to my chest and brain was utter despair. As I went on reading the proposed services, I suddenly turned numb all over, and blacked out in my mind.

This company, as I imagine several others, offers perfectly squeaky clean writing of all kinds of pieces. I found that it specializes in academic writing. They charge a fee for producing spotless written works for professors, students of all levels, and many prestigious universities as a whole. Judging by their client list, many renowned universities already apply this service to their work.

Now, what we can figure out from the company website is that they charge professional professors for papers they should be writing for their classes. And, even worse, they charge students for writing essays, reports, stories, articles, and thesis!

I do not think, honestly, that writing this material in educational environments is repetitive, or tedious. This cannot be used to justify the unregulated use of AI for the task. Perhaps that is how people who have been doing it for a long time perceive this work. In any case, many questions come to mind.

Don’t parents or even university students themselves pay large amounts of money to receive instruction, preparation, training, mentoring, and guidelines from specialized professors? Isn’t that the exact role of university faculty? Otherwise, students are receiving content directly from AI. As accurate as that may be, in many careers this might prove to be quite dangerous, dishonest, and unethical.

On the student side, it is even more serious. Students are supposed to submit their own pieces of writing. And that is supposed to be graded by faculty. How will professors determine whether students have learned their trade or not, if AI is the one doing all the work? This is not light editing we are talking about. It is hardcore writing from scratch.

Disastrous Consequences

This practice undoubtedly undermines the value of university education. In this era, honest work, including intellectual tasks, seem to be worthless. Many people want easy earnings for doing next to nothing. A bit too much energy is devoted to developing AI, instead of teaching people to be productive, useful, and to make a difference for their community. 

How can you trust your health and safety into a doctor’s hands, when AI has taught him, and he has never written his own dissertations? Instead, it has all been artificially produced.

There are quite serious consequences to this scary scheme. Students who rely exclusively on AI for their academic written work may graduate without the necessary tools of the trade. Their knowledge and skills might not be top notch or even minimum. And this could lead to broader societal issues, particularly in critical fields, such as medicine, law, sciences and much more.

The Safest Way to Protect Educational Standards

Educational institutions and governments should join forces to develop laws and policies that explicitly prohibit the unethical use of AI for academic assignments. These regulations should establish clear penalties for both users and providers of such services.

Universities need to clarify what entails unethical uses of AI, and establish consequences for violations.

In order to guarantee compliance with new regulations, periodical audits and checks must be performed.

Universities could install AI-detection software and train faculty to recognize AI-generated content, and report it.

Urgent Changes in Educational Systems

New curriculum should include ethics and digital literacy. Students need to be taught about the ethical use of technology and the importance of academic integrity. It seems rather obvious to me, and perhaps my generation, but humanity has dropped a couple of values along the way.

Alternative assessment methods could be applied in order to avoid AI misuse. These could come in the form of oral exams, practical assessments, and project-based evaluations.

And most importantly, students should know that the educational institution values their honest work and personal development. The greatest achievement would be to get students to value that as well.

Tiny Editorial

Just to clarify, in case of any extreme thinker out there. I completely support the use of AI for many purposes. Replacing creative tasks, and “saving” humans from important responsibilities they should be fulfilling, nevertheless, are not uses I personally endorse. There is a fine line, of course, and subjectivity might play a part here. The stakes are astronomical, and so is the money to be earned by gigantic corporations. That is no excuse to lose a bit of ourselves in the process. If their developers keep stating that AI is meant to be a tool for humans, then let’s stick to that for our own well-being, and make the most of such a marvelous combination.

Check out more articles on Spanish-related topics, translation, localization, and more in our hub article below.

https://www.bureauworks.com/blog/spanish-to-english-translation-services‍