The Role of AI in the Student’s Research/Creation Process

University faculty and the academic framework of the college environment play a critical role in facilitating the intellectual growth of the student researcher and demonstrating the cumulative scope of the research process, of which the students will ultimately become the drivers. Thus, faculty in supervisory research roles will need  to be cognizant of how the use of artificial intelligence and generative models can both help and hinder the research process and growth of the researcher.

Although coursework can be more and less open-ended, there is typically a more defined and a priori-known result or conclusion inherent in the learning objectives required for a given course. Indeed, it may be that open-ended learning is a learning objective in some courses. Nonetheless, there is a distinct difference between coursework learning and the learning of the research process, namely that inherent in fundamental research is that the result is not known a priori; otherwise the result would not be a discovery. Thus, there are considerations unique to the research process that are important to highlight.

In this section, we discuss AI and generative models in the context of the intellectual growth of the student researcher, the development of research and scholarship, and the assessment of research and scholarship.