A uni professor admitted using AI to write an opinion piece. Here’s what it revealed about trust in the technology | Australia news
The growing gap between people’s use of AI and their trust in the technology was underlined this week when a university vice-chancellor admitted to using AI while writing an opinion piece for a major imprint in Australia, but did not disclose that use before publication.
Data from Roy Morgan this week showed that 13.6 million, or 58%, of the over-14 population now use AI every month, with ChatGPT being the most popular, followed by Google’s Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
Australians aged 25-34 use AI the most (74%), followed by those aged 35-49 (72%); This shows that most of the workforce are currently using these tools.
Guardian Australia has covered extensively how it affects all sectors, from healthcare to the legal system. Because large language models are built into the products we already use, whether we want them to or not, people will use them.
But Australians deeply distrust AI and how people use it. a survey A survey from the Australian Information Commissioner’s Office last month found that just 4% of Australians trust AI, putting the industry on par with data brokers and 1% above social media platforms.
The survey found that 79 percent of people want to know when AI is being used; this rate was 73 percent in 2023.
What concerns people most seems to be the lack of transparency regarding when and how it is used.
The revelation this week that Western Sydney University vice-chancellor Cath Ellis had used AI while writing an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald further suggested that she had used less than AI, but that the university had accepted it.
Western Sydney University admitted to Guardian Australia that Microsoft’s Copilot was used in the development of the work; This, ironically, made the argument against students cutting corners since large language models were available for essays and other university work.
The admission was made after the story broke, which led to SMH removing the piece following investigations by Guardian Australia. The newspaper ran a mea culpa story later that day.
It might have been a different story if Ellis had been transparent about his own use of AI and how useful it was. But then again, it may have never been published.
The existence of these patterns means that the question of whether a piece of writing truly belongs to the author is unlikely to disappear in academia, workplaces, and the media any time soon.
This week Fair Work Australia He said he would ask for new powers Rejection of AI applications due to an unsustainable increase in applications with clearly little effort or expectation of success.
Academic journals have established policies against the use of generative AI in articles, but are reports The use of artificial intelligence is increasing rapidly.
In the world of programming, where AI is said to provide the most benefits and efficiency, there are even signs that its use in open source programming is being dialed back. like zig.
Growing distrust of AI now means anyone could face witch hunt-style accusations for using it; Even if it isn’t, using AI may make people want to simply turn it off.
Why bother bothering with something that people don’t put much effort into?
Accusations that things are being done (but not disclosed) with AI are becoming more and more frequent, and this isn’t just limited to the news media.
O!, the director of RuPaul’s latest movie, Stop! Train! This week, the film had to make a statement stating that it was not made using artificial intelligence, after viewers who watched the first screenings believed that some scenes were made with technology.
Without transparency about how AI is used, its benefits will not be evident and will not be normalized in the way that AI advocates would like. Ignoring the use of AI for fear of being called out for using AI, rightly or wrongly, will undermine trust in our existing industries.
