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Generative AI: AI and GenAI

Artificial Intelligence and Generative Artificial Intelligence

This guide looks at the impact that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) could have on your education and aims to answer the following questions: 

What are artificial intelligence (AI) and GenAI? How does GenAI work? Can I use GenAI to help me learn and write my coursework? To what extent? How? Will a text written with AI sound better and get higher marks? Will I learn in my degree and enrich my mind if I use GenAI, or will I miss learning opportunities and diminish my cognitive abilities?  

In addition to using this guide all students are advised to thoroughly familiarise themselves with the university’s Guidance for Students on the use of Generative AI.

The guide shows that GenAI can be a valuable tool to support your writing and learning if used responsibly and with due diligence. It's important to understand that GenAI has strengths and limitations. While it can process and generate information quickly, it may lack the context-specific understanding and critical thinking skills crucial in academic work. Therefore, it's essential to use GenAI thoughtfully, follow university guidelines, and develop your intellectual and analytical skills alongside its use.

The guide is structured as follows: 

Contents of this tab:

  1. What Are AI and GenAI?
  2. AI and GenAI Videos
  3. References

What Are AI and GenAI?

What is Artificial Intelligence?

We commonly refer to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as intelligence exhibited by machines. There is a lot of excitement about AI at the moment and two questions may be asked: 1) Is AI a new discovery? 2) Is AI surpassing human intelligence? The answer to both questions is: no. In fact, in turn: 1) AI has been around for decades. 2) All current types of AI still qualify as "weak AI", as opposed to "strong AI". It is useful to present the distinction between weak and strong AI:

  • Weak AI, also known as narrow AI, focuses on performing a specific task. We may be familiar with weak AI, perhaps without realising it, as we have used or heard of chatbots, email spam filters, Spotify shuffle, Deep Blue (AI chess player) and self-driving cars. Impressive as it is, Generative AI is generally seen as weak AI. 
  • Strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is supposed to perform as well as or better than humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks. This form of intelligence is still eluding us, and is the primary goal of many AI research and companies.

Generative AI 

Generative AI (GenAI) is a type of AI that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data it was trained on (Martineau, 2023). Popular GenAI models include GrammarlyGO, ChatGPT, Copilot and DALLE-E.

The University of Westminster provides a premium account to Grammarly to all its students (and staff). The account includes a GenAI component (GrammarlyGO) that assists you directly in the apps and websites where you already write—which means no toggling back and forth between apps, websites, and chatbots to get your tasks done. Grammarly also commits to comply with GDPR and handle personal data with care. 

How GenAI works

GenAI is built with neural networks (mimicking the human brain) that undertake machine learning by finding patterns in existing data sets. AI based on neural networks differs from "Good Old Fashioned AI" (GOFAI) which was rule-based (logical/symbolic) and used explicitly crafted rules for generating responses or data sets (Lawton, 2024). GenAI mostly works following probability, which helps it to deal with complexity and contingency, but makes it fallible. That said, things are moving fast in this field and GenAI is demonstrating emergent abilities, while work is being done to improve GenAI accuracy, for instance developing neuro-symbolic GenAI (Musser, 2023; Dupuy, 2024). 

Impact on your studies

Generative can have a strong impact on your education. GenAI could complete your coursework for you, but if you do this you are effectively cheating and breaching academic integrity principles. Please read the Guidance for Students on Using Generative AI for full details and to find out how you can use Generative AI responsibly. You should also consider that the quality of the GenAI outputs does not generally meet academic standards. 

An image generated by the AI program DALL-E 2 (OpenAI)

AI and GenAI Videos

The following video provides an introduction to using GenAI at the University of Westminster:

 

The following video provides a comprehensive and clear account of AI and GenAI: 

References

Dupuy, J. (2024) Next-gen AI integrates logic and learning: 5 things to know, Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuadupuy/2024/05/31/next-gen-ai-integrates-logic-and-learning-5-things-to-know/ (Accessed: 09 September 2024).

Lawton, G. (2024) What is Generative AI? everything you need to know, Enterprise AI. Available at: https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/generative-AI (Accessed: 09 September 2024).

Martineau, K. (2023) What is Generative AI?, IBM Research. Available at: https://research.ibm.com/blog/what-is-generative-AI (Accessed: 09 September 2024).

Musser G. (2023), ‘How AI Knows Things No One Told It’, Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-ai-knows-things-no-one-told-it/ (Accessed: 18 December 2023).

Russell, S.J., Norvig, P. and Chang, M.-W. (2021) Artificial intelligence: a modern approach. Fourth edition. Harlow, United Kingdom: Pearson.