On 4 December 2024, the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education held the webinar “Academic Writing and Artificial Intelligence Technologies: Effects and Risks”, organized as part of the webinar series “Harnessing Technology to Transform Education”, aimed to strengthen global and regional partnerships towards the innovative and ethical use of digital technologies in education for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). The event was organized remotely on Zoom platform and brought together more than 200 registered participants from the scientific and educational organizations in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and other countries. The working language of the webinar was Russian.
Programme Specialist of the Unit of Digital Pedagogy and Learning Materials at UNESCO IITE, Candidate of Education, Associate Professor Oksana Chigisheva moderated the webinar. She welcomed the participants and told about UNESCO IITE and its activities in promoting the use of ICT and AI in education. She also suggested identifying and discussing the effects and risks associated with the increased use of artificial intelligence when writing academic and scientific texts by the participants of the scientific and educational process.
Three keynote speakers took part in the event. The Head of the Center for Academic Writing and Communication at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Doctor of Education, Associate Professor Irina Korotkina described in her presentation “Informative value of metadata: the limits of AI use” how the authors of publications can use AI in their work, particularly for finding information and editing text. In addition, using the example of creating an informative title and abstract of the scientific article, Irina Korotkina showed how to avoid mistakes that cannot be corrected by AI. The speaker emphasized the importance of teaching this type of activity within the discipline “Academic writing”.
The second speaker, Anastasia Atabekova, Vice-Rector for Multilingual Development, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages at the Law Institute of Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba, Doctor of Philology, Professor, Master of Law, delivered the presentation “Academic Writing and GenAI: the effectiveness of prompts to help teachers and students”. She noted that today, the procedures and practices of prompt engineering are of special concern when using AI to solve educational and research tasks. The report showed that the ability to create queries for AI is one of the key skills in the age of AI, as it allows to maximize the potential of AI and set queries so that the model responds with a minimum of errors or without them. The speaker also shared practical recommendations based on her experience of teaching RUDN University students learning academic writing in a foreign language how to use prompts.
The third speaker was the President of the company “Antiplagiat”, Candidate of Physics and Mathematics Yuriy Chekhovich. During the presentation “Using generative AI tools in the preparation of educational and scientific papers: opportunities and risks”, he focused on a serious issue concerning the ethics of using AI-generated texts in the scientific and educational process. He presented the capabilities of the AI detection service in the “Antiplagiat” system, described typical signs of the generated text presence in the documents and also noted that currently the risks of using AI in the academic work had not been fully studied yet and would require further reflection.
The webinar ended with a short questions-and-answers session, allowing the participants to ask the speakers clarification questions that arose during the webinar.
The recording of the webinar is available at the UNESCO IITE YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPxWZHSc3NM