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Image Credits: National Gallery of Art, Open Access Collection

— Written by Reece Barlow

If I met an individual who declared not to have an opinion on Artificial Intelligence (AI), I would raise my eyebrows. If I met a scholar who made the same claim, I would call them a liar. It is not surprising that a community whose members spend their time on intellectual pursuits would form strong opinions on a technology that tech executives repeatedly present as possessing "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD-level reasoning". The vast majority of scholars, researchers and academics do not, in fact, believe that this technology is truly 'intelligent'. Instead, a broad consensus has emerged among the academic community that AI - despite its name - is little more than a tool. However, this note of harmony has not stopped a schism from forming among the scholarly community down the line of whether we should use this tool in our scholarship.

The academic community, certainly on social media, is broadly split into two camps:

The point of this essay is not to adjudicate which of these positions is correct. As with most "hot takes" on social media, nuance is in short supply. A more interesting question is not whether we should, or should not, use AI in academic research, but what our position on academic research signals about what we believe makes a "good scholar" and where that belief comes from.