Mzumbe University (MU)

Soft Skills For Students

AI & Generative AI Tools for Academia: Applications,

Advantages, Disadvantages, and Ethical Considerations

Dr. Morice Daud & Mr. Kilima, Frank Godlove

Mzumbe University

May 19, 2024

1 / 13
Presentation outline

✓ Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Meaning

✓ Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) Tools - Meaning
✓ Gen AI Tools - Examples and applications
✓ AI & Gen AI Tools - Advantages
✓ AI & Gen AI Tools - Disadvantages
✓ Gen AI Tools - Ethical Considerations

2 / 13
Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Meaning
■ Artificial intelligence (AI): The science and art of creating
machines/agents which perform functions that require human
intelligence when performed by people.
■ Akili unde or akili mnemba in Kiswahili
■ Common examples of AI-based systems include;
⋆ Education:
✓ Recommending courses and references to students and teachers
✓ Offering personalized learning experience to individual students
✓ Intelligent tutoring systems
✓ Handling of tasks including grading, attendance tracking
✓ Generation and updation of educational content
✓ Answering academic and non-academic questions
✓ Developing research outlines - Research topic, research objectives
and research questions, research methodology, data analysis etc.
✓ Text summarization
✓ Grammar checking, spelling checking, proofreading etc.
⋆ Assembly lines and manufacturing plants:
✓ Industrial automation
✓ Quality control and product inspection
⋆ Agriculture:
✓ Yield prediction
✓ Disease detection
✓ Precision farming
✓ Weather forecasting, Identify soil nutrients 3 / 13
Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Meaning
■ Common examples of AI-based systems include;
⋆ Transportation:
✓ Self-driving vehicles are safe, reliable and accessible driverless
vehicles operating on normal roads
⋆ Social media:
✓ Sentiment analysis
✓ Fake news detection
✓ Content recommendation
✓ Content filtering and moderation
⋆ E-commerce:
✓ Chatbots help customers navigate websites and get searches
✓ Respond to queries and provide technical support
✓ Provide personalized product recommendation
⋆ Finance:
✓ Fraud detection
✓ Predicting market trends
✓ Risk assessment
✓ Financial forecasting
⋆ Healthcare and medicine:
✓ Drug discovery
✓ Medical image analysis
✓ Personalized treatment
✓ Development of new treatments
4 / 13
Generative artificial intelligence - Meaning
■ Gen AI: Includes ML-based models which create new contents
across multiple types of media including audio, code, music,
images, text, simulations, videos from training data.
■ Involves training MLAs how to understand and analyze large
datasets and use the knowledge to generate synthetic data.
■ Different types of Generative AI models;
⋆ Content creation and storytelling: Generates content such as
news or descriptions, answering questions
⋆ Art, entertainment and music: Script writing, music
composition, synthetic image and video creation etc.
⋆ Medicine and drug: Generating molecule combination for drug
discovery
⋆ Text generation and NLP: Generates text to enable applications
such as chatbots, virtual assistants, language translation,
content generation for written media
⋆ Product design and prototyping: Generates 3D models,
architectural designs etc.
⋆ Fashion and style generation: Creates new fashion designs,
generate personalized clothing recommendations etc.
5 / 13
Gen AI Tools - Examples and applications
■ ChatGPT:
⋆ Generating textual content and content ideas.
⋆ Grammar checking, spelling checking, proofreading etc.
⋆ Creating and editing computer programs
⋆ Automatically generating contents for articles, blogs, product
descriptions, email responses, term papers, and social media.
⋆ Facilitating language translation of text from one language to
another.
⋆ Generating concise text summaries of lengthy documents
⋆ Converting written text into human natural-sounding speech.
⋆ Answering academic and non-academic questions
⋆ Developing research outlines - Research topic, ROs and RQs,
research methodology, data analysis etc.
⋆ Script writing
■ Google Gemini:
⋆ Supplementing Google search
⋆ Providing customer services to users on websites, applications,
messaging platforms
■ Dall-E:
⋆ Automatically creating images or video from a text description
or generates text captions from images.
6 / 13
AI & Gen AI Tools - Advantages

■ Improved accuracy: AI models/agents produce more correct

output than human when they are correctly programmed and
given reliable input (data).
■ Improved human safety and enable difficult and dangerous
exploration: Makes possible to perform tasks which were
otherwise impossible, risky or dangerous to the lives of
human operators.
■ Increased efficiency: AI models are more faster and more
reliable than human beings, and can work for longer time and
can process very large amount of data accurately.
■ Automation: AI-based systems are effective in automating
repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

7 / 13
AI & Gen AI Tools - Advantages

■ Increased accessibility of academic information and

assistance (24/7).
■ Provides personalized learning and therefore promoting
learning experience.
■ Improving language skills by offering grammar suggestions and
vocabulary enhancement.
■ Assist students in preparing for assignments, tests,
examinations, presentation, research activities etc.
■ Provides instant clarification of complex concepts.
■ Provides self-directing knowledge
■ Allows students to explore subjects at their own pace and
style.

8 / 13
AI & Gen AI Tools - Disadvantages

■ Ethical concerns: Misuse of synthetic media, deepfakes,

misinformation, deception, puffery.
■ Inaccurate answers: They may produce inaccurate answers or
behave erratically.
■ Algorithmic bias: Prone to algorithmic bias contained in
training data which may lead to unfair or discriminatory
outcomes in domains including hiring, criminal justice,
lending, traffic, healthcare based on race, gender, sex etc.
■ Inconsistent results: Owing to large amounts of data used to
develop them, Gen AIs are prone to generating different
output from the same input request by different users and at
different time.
■ Reputational and legal risks: AI-generated output may subject
users to reputational and legal risks resulting from
unintentionally publishing biased, offensive or infringement
of intellectual property rights (plagiarism).

9 / 13
AI & Gen AI Tools - Disadvantages

■ Knowledge cut-off data: Gen AI tools, including ChatGPT, have

knowledge cut-off data and prone to generating outdated or
with missing information, eg. ChatGPT - Jan 2022.
■ Negative impact on students’ critical thinking and problem
solving abilities: Over-relience on Gen AI tools is likely to
adversely affect critical thinking, problem solving
abilities, independence etc of students.
■ Plagiarism and cheating: Submission of AI-generated works
including project assignments, dissertation, project report,
books, stories, designs, examination questions etc.
■ Lack of transparency and explainability: Many AI models are
complex and difficult to understand their decision making
process based on what they have learned from data.
⋆ They are therefore considered "black boxes" because it is
difficult to understand their decision-making processes

10 / 13
AI & Gen AI Tools - Disadvantages

■ May facilitate criminal or unethical activities: They can be

manipulated to facilitate unethical or criminal activity.
■ Security and privacy issues: Vulnerable to data unauthorized
use and theft of data, and/or manipulation which can lead to
malicious attacks such as unauthorized access to systems etc.
■ Job displacement: Automation and AI technologies have the
potential to replace certain jobs, which can lead to
workforce disruptions.
■ Energy consumption: Training and running AI systems require
a great deal of computing power and electricity.
⋆ Resulting CO2 emissions significantly contribute to carbon
footprint, which aggravates climate change.

11 / 13
Gen AI Tools - Ethical use & considerations

■ Gen AI tools do not replace learning and answer finding for

academic questions through conventional means - Reading
books, doing calculations, writing proposals etc.
■ Verify the veracity (truth) of AI-generated content from
reliable sources including books, websites, experts.
■ Paraphrase AI-generated contents in your own words: Do not
use/submit the AI-generated contents as it is.
■ Gen AI tools should supplement students' core knowledge.
■ Test your AI-generated content for plagiarism using one of
the many available AI detectors.
■ Respect your lecturers: Use Gen AI tools in the background
or with permission from them and do not assume that Gen AI
tools are more intelligent or better than them.
■ Provide relevant citations and references.

12 / 13
Gen AI Tools - Ethical use & considerations
■ Unfortunately, many users own and trust AI-generated
contents.
■ AI-generated content may contain factual errors, outdated
information, or inaccuracies owing to various reasons
including biases in the training data
■ Consider the following when assessing AI-generated contents;
⋆ Cross-reference the information with reliable sources, such as
scholarly articles, textbooks, and websites to check if the
content is true.
⋆ Look for inconsistencies or contradictions within the text.
⋆ Be aware of the AI's knowledge cutoff date as it may not have
the most recent information.
⋆ Check if the content addresses the specific needs of the target
audience
⋆ Check the coherence, organization and language used in the text
⋆ Let AI-generated output be verified by human before being
published or used.
⋆ Avoid AI-generated content for making critical decisions.
⋆ AI-generated contents are prone to various biases inherent to
training data.
13 / 13