Academia in transition– what AI brings to the university?

Abstrakt

Digitization, including its last prominent development, namely AI, encompasses many stakeholders and various types of relationships. In this universe, academics and universities, although being an integral part of it are rarely mentioned. At the
same time AI triggered revolution in many aspects of academic life, being now an indispensable part of discussion at many conferences and academic meetings. Also, a number of papers discuss AI and certainly many of them were written with use of AI too. With that said, there are many questions on how to live in the new reality, in particular concerning use of AI by academic teachers, students and researchers. This paper discusses the way AI changes academic world in its many dimensions, including but not limited to teaching, research, publishing academic manuscripts and supervising master and PhD/DBA candidates. To this
end, one of the relevant questions is if a unified approach to use of AI tools in academic world is needed or not, at least across the EU. It is because adopting different models of permissible use of AI in academia, may raise many concerns relating to teaching, evaluation of students’ works as well as academic degrees obtained under different models. Therefore, the main objective of the paper is to discuss how to use AI in academia, but also if any intervention at the EU or the EU Member States’ level is needed or required, and to the extent limited by current knowledge, to give some recommendations in this respect.