A lecturer at the Department of software engineering Bayero University Kano,Dr Sana Abdullahi Muaz has said Artificial Intelligence (AI) should not be viewed as a replacement for academic expertise in the nation’s universities but as an intelligent assistant that can enhance productivity, creativity and learning when used responsibly and critically.
The academic said this at the 6th Digital Tech Policy forum convened by the Centre for Information Technology and Development CITAD with a theme: AI in Academia: Negotiating Benefits in the context of crisis and complexity.
She said AI is not only about creating machines that think like humans but it is essentially about augmenting human intelligence by learning from data to solve a problem and help in decision making.
Dr Muaz observed that students use generative AI to produce a research problem in just 5 seconds while academics spend hours studying essays to understand what the minds of the students are thinking, noting that the whole conversation revolves around power, education and research.
She also said students use AI to write full thesis chapters and often carelessly paste the same in sensitive research data which she believed is a negative usage of AI and must not be encouraged.
“AI should assist academic thinking not replace scholarly judgement.It can unintentionally reproduce bias because of ethical and algorithm bias.
“When AI generates a first draft, for instance, it is a lecturer’s responsibility to review,edit and validate the contents,” said she.
Muaz listed the benefits of AI in Teaching by using AI tools to analyse students past performance to tailor academic qualifications or in Research by summarising thousands of academic papers in minutes to extract trends in research topics.
She said handling repetitive tasks faster like picture reviews and data analysis allows the researcher to focus on critical thinking towards validating research hypotheses.
She however, noted that the complexity of AI usage is that it is not a neutral tool and therefore its benefits must be measured along with its risks,recommending strategies for best AI adoption in the academia.
A software engineer with CITAD Muhammad Bello Yahya in his contribution said upholding academic integrity in a multifaceted learning environment and building responsible AI in Higher Education are imperative.
He ended with a quote from UNESCO which says : ” Generative AI offers tremendous opportunity for education and research, but it must be guided by ethical principles.”
The dialogue was attended by academics, telecom industry regulators, government agencies,civil society organisations,media practitioners and the private sector operators.