Being (critical, ethical, reflexive…) human in the age of AI

A/Prof Daniela Gachago, CILT, CHED

Caveat

It’s all moving very fast…

Change is inevitable…

Don’t get too wedded to anything…

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Where do you stand in relation to AI?

My perspective today...

• Academic staff developer in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching promoting and supporting genAI in T, L & Research
• Teaching PG programmes through the School of Education
• PGDip in EdTech, Blended and Online Learning Design, Med in EdTech and Higher Education Studies
• Faculty of Humanities MED and PHD Supervisor
• External examiner
• Research ethics committee member
• Managing Editor of CriSTaL (Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

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With a few exceptions, the scientific and scholarly community has reached a broad consensus that

1. AI tools can be used in research and to assist scholars in specific tasks, such as copyediting and data analysis;
2. AI tools cannot be named as authors because they cannot be held morally or legally responsible for their work; and
3. the use of AI tools in research should be fully disclosed to promote transparency (COPE 2024; ICMJE 2024; Kaebnick et al. 2023).

Resnik, D. B., & Hosseini, M. (2026). Disclosing artificial intelligence use in scientific research and publication: When should disclosure be mandatory, optional, or unnecessary? Accountability in Research, 33(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2025.2481949 

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https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-05-28-ai-is-eating-the-academic-publishing-industry-alive-but-some-good-might-come-of-it/

Who are our students

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• Different context: HE, schools, NGOs, EdTech companies, corporate world, government

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• Adult learners, juggling multiple responsibilities

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• Highly different academic and digital literacy skills

How does AI help our students?

• Thinking partner
• Brainstorming
• One demand positive feedback
• Unpacking difficult concepts / theories
• Establishing gaps in the literature
• English language support
• Disciplinary language support

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https://padlet.com/uct/2026_05_12-exploring-practical-ways-to-support-ai-use-in-pos-opevcqjyzf98h4j0 thank you to Shanali Govender!

What are the risks?

• postgraduate work is fundamentally about developing ones intellectual judgment
• risk of jumping important steps of grappling with writing – sitting with uncertainty and discomfort
• “do I belong here, does my thinking count? “

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• The danger isn't plagiarism. It's something quieter: students who never find out what they actually think or how their voice sounds

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Some traps I have seen…

• Hallucination as a structural problem
• The decontextual trap
• The confidence trap
• Outsourcing the struggle
• Dependency without capability

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• Somewhere between techno-pessimism and techno-optimism is the position this piece is arguing for. Not refusal. Not uncritical adoption. Literacy. Sovereignty. The capacity to engage deliberately with a medium you are already inside. To understand its grain, its tendencies, what it does to you when you engage without awareness. Rather than being used by it in either direction: enchanted into dependency or shamed into secret use.�Individual abstention inside a society already saturated with AI infrastructure functions more symbolically than structurally. The medium is infrastructural now. People are already inside AI-mediated systems whether they consciously use AI or not. The struggle shifts from avoid all contact to preserve agency under conditions of contact.�That is why literacy is resistance

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So what do I do?

• Modelling / scaffolding
• Process learning (reflective process journals, iterative drafts with visible reasoning, viva-style checkpoints)
• Conversations
• Relationship building
• Openness and transparency
• Making AI part of the curriculum
• Critical AI literacy
• Grace

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“The only way to know what your students are thinking and if they are doing their work properly, and to help them do it properly, is to spend time with them. It is too late to do this during an end of semester oral exam.” Tim Fawns, https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7465510261269893120/

EDN5511 Researching HE

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Students’ final assignments

Rather than relying on AI tools to generate substantive content, I used them primarily to review, critique, and provide feedback on material that I had developed myself. This enabled me to retain ownership of the research process and ensure that the study remained grounded in its specific context while still benefiting from AI-assisted support. In this way, AI functioned as a supplementary research and writing aid rather than a substitute for critical thinking, contextual analysis, and scholarly judgement.

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Students’ final assignments

At the same time, I do not believe it is possible, or even responsible, to think about AI as a neutral or objective tool. The literature increasingly argues that technology and human activity are deeply entangled in what is often described as a postdigital era, where the boundaries between technological systems and human thinking are

increasingly blurred (Bearman, Ryan and Ajjawi, 2023). This became visible in my own engagement with AI. While AI often helped me refine and extend my thinking, there were moments when I felt it subtly persuaded or redirected my thinking in ways that did not fully align with my original interests, intentions, or research focus. Sometimes AI responses appeared authoritative, coherent, and convincing, even when they steered my thinking way from what I was genuinely trying to explore.

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Throughout this course I have often purposefully not used AI, especially in instances where I have given my opinion. My grammar might be terrible, and my thoughts jumbled, but I do not want to lose my ability to think or articulate my ideas. My hope is that we can shift the focus of research from technical proficiency (good academic writing, data gathering, etc.), which are the aspects I think that many people have traditionally struggled with during the research process, to a focus on what you are thinking, what you understand and can find out about your context and what the broader implications might be of these finding

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Maha Bali

As a human, I am critical of the colonialist, capitalist, racist, Eugenicist roots of AI and the way it is overhyped and also has been historically used to harm humans and exacerbate inequality under the illusion of neutral automation. However, I have also believed for a long time that I cannot control or even attempt to control how students use AI. My overall approach is to spend a lot of time nurturing their critical AI literacy so they’re aware of the ethical considerations, hallucinations, biases, and roots of who and which ideologies lie behind AI tools, show them some alternative tools that hallucinate less.

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The ability to say no / refuse AI

Thank you

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Tools to consider

Source: www.freepik.com

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Determining your position

McCorkle, S. (2025). Designing an Aligned Generative AI Course Policy: An Equitable and Transparent Learner-Centered Approach. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 16(2), 96-110.

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Institutional policies or guidelines

Faculty/ department policies or guidelines

Course AI policy or position statement

Task AI requirements and guidelines

• What are the steps for the Individual Assessment?
• What might we be learning at this step?
• Is this a core learning outcome?
• How could we use AI to support this outcome?
• What would be gained?  What would be lost? If we did use AI? 

Communicating a position

Source: www.freepik.com

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Communicating your GenAI position

• Share early and iteratively​
• Open space for conversation (anonymous?) about the document​
• Keep the document alive in class/ supervision – Beginning --> middle -> end (Shift in values)​
• Bring your position statement into a task analysis process (McCorkle, 2025 to follow)​

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Disclosure

Source: www.freepik.com

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Researching (with) disclosure

• Disclosure centres concerns about trust, academic integrity, and author credibility and accountability
• Type of tool(s) used
• Purpose of use
• AI Logs
• Engage with your students' logs
• Shared access (??)
• Stakeholders – external examiners, scholarly community?

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When students admit AI use, but won't share their AI use with you?

The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework

• Increased transparency
• Kari Weaver (Waterloo)
• Inspired by Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
• Provide brief, targeted disclosure of GenAI use, associated with activities used for research writing
• AID Statement Example

https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26548/34482

https://sarua.africa/artificial-intelligence-disclosure-framework/

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Artificial Intelligence Tool: ChatGPT v.4o and Microsoft Copilot (University of Waterloo institutional instance); Conceptualization: ChatGPT was used to revise research questions; Data Collection Methods: ChatGPT was used to create the first draft of the survey instrument; Data Analysis: Microsoft Copilot was used to verify identified themes coded from open ended survey responses; Privacy and Security: no identifiable data was shared with ChatGPT during the design of this study, only the University of Waterloo institutional instance of Microsoft Copilot was used to analyze any anonymized research data in compliance with University of Waterloo privacy and security policies; Writing—Review & Editing: ChatGPT was used in the literature review to provide sentence-level revisions and metaphor options; Project Administration: ChatGPT was used to establish a list of tasks and timelines for the study.

Resources and development

Source: www.freepik.com

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Support resources available

CILT resources

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UCT Libraries: AI LibGuide

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Thank you

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