DO NOT USE A.I.

Policy on the use of AI in Philosophy Courses

Philosophy is human made! The use of AI is prohibited when completing assessed work in philosophy.

Philosophy courses aim to foster careful original thought, improve persuasive academic writing skills, and enhance students’ abilities to understand complex topics. Using generative AI tools to produce assessed work is almost always detrimental to this aim, which is why the use of AI is prohibited in writing, revising, and editing of academic work that is submitted for assessment in Philosophy. This includes undergraduate and postgraduate essays, undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, take-home exams, or any other form of assessment.

Definition: AI includes but is not limited to...

• • Generative AI systems capable of producing essays, summaries, explanations, or arguments

  • AI systems that use Large Language Models (LLM)

  • Automated paraphrasing or rewriting tools

  • AI systems that generate images, audio, or video

  • AI systems that answer questions or provide explanations in natural language

This definition includes all models of ChatGPT, all models of Gemini, all models of Claude, as well as similar tools such as Midjourney, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Grammarly.

Violations of the policy will result in a grading penalty:

≤ 40% Margin of Error [WARNING]

41-45% 1/3 credit penalty

46-60% 1/2 credit penalty

61-74% 2/3 credit penalty

≥ 75%  0 credit

Justification of policy:

• 1. Educational significance: The articulation and organization of one’s thought through critical reading and linguistic expression is the very activity that constitutes the study and practice of philosophy. The use of AI in writing, revising, and editing academic work avoids engaging in the very activity that the study and practice of philosophy consist of. The use of AI directly hinders philosophical learning. (You wouldn’t send a robot to the gym and expect to get fit; it is the same with learning.)

  2. Academic integrity: The written work that is submitted for assessment in a course is a manifestation of a student’s learning in a course. The use of AI violates the principle of academic integrity since it represents something as one’s own learning that is not so. This is straightforwardly dishonest.

  3. Intellectual autonomy: In leaving the articulation and organization of thought to an AI system, one eschews an activity that is integral to the study and practice of philosophy. This is a failure of intellectual integrity: it is a failure to think for oneself.

  4. Cognitive harm: Philosophy aims todevelop your knowledge and teach certain skills, chiefly thinking skills. Using AI not only prevents the acquisition of knowledge and the development of thinking but undermines thinking skills you already have: ‘cognitive offloading’, ‘metacognitive laziness’ and reduction in capacity for critical thinking are associated with this technology.

  5. Quality: Text generated by AI often looks good: it is well-structured, polished, and correctly formulated, and it uses technical terms in a way that makes it seem as if there is genuine understanding. However, AI-generated text is often shallow and stereotypical, and sometimes downright false. It looks better than it is.

  6. AI reproduces bias: AI systems that are trained on texts that are available online replicate the biases that are internal to these texts. AI systems also exhibit algorithmic biases, intended and unintended, none of which are visible to users of these systems.

  7. AI is piracy: Many AI systems are trained on texts that are available online. Most of these texts were not written with such training in mind, and consent from their authors was not obtained. AI systems are, therefore, built on piracy in the service of profit-driven corporations. Contributing our own prompts and documents to these systems amounts to collusion in such piracy.

  8. Environmental impact: AI systems use enormous amounts of energy and have a very large environmental impact, which exacerbates the climate crisis.

  9. Political significance: Most AI systems are produced by profit-driven corporations, even when they are sold to universities as separate systems. AI systems are marketed with the narrative that integration into higher education is inevitable, tapping into people’s anxieties about writing, thinking, and scholarship. However, this narrative is false, and the outcome is not inevitable: The corporate takeover of language and thought will only succeed if academics and students allow it.

• Source: Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh