What will remain ours in the age of AI?

In the past, people would view a glacier chunk falling into a lake and causing a river to overflow as a cosmic event or divine act. Now that we have placed an eye in the sky, the satellite images can help us understand how the unprecedented flash flood in the Nepal-Tibet border area happened. And to aid human reason, AI is employed to piece together the exact way the mountain and the river interlocked in a cataclysmic event.

The event is a reminder how small and insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of things. Many images online highlight humanity’s extremes: people risking their lives to save others, while some others scavenging through debris to loot from the dead. One image of a two-storey building surviving the onrush of waters made many of us think of miracles. Then came the scientific explanations, where structural engineers showed the extra piling used to anchor the house. The image made me reflect on the very connection between deep and surface structures.

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While presenting a plenary talk at the recently held AI conclave at BRAC University, I used this solitary house image as a metaphor to argue for the need for a strong foundation in a deluge of information. As a student of literature and culture, I have a holistic approach to the onrush of information that has flooded our screens. In academia, we are unsure how to deal with the exponential growth of technology. There is no denying the fact that research today is much more computational, data-driven, industry-led and interdisciplinary; knowledge production relies heavily on technology. AI is here to stay, but how to approach it is another matter.

An MIT media lab publication titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” finds that brain-only writers have the strongest, followed by search users with intermediate, and Large Language Model (LLM) users with the weakest brain connectivity. Yale University has responded by developing an AI guidance for students, encouraging them to think critically about the technology.

As policymakers have stated sporadically, Bangladesh is working on an AI policy. AI is now being considered a life skill. Algorithmic ads targeting groups of people becoming experts on digital tools in under a month are plentiful. But can one truly become an expert in anything without a solid grounding in that subject? That is precisely the question I floated in the AI conclave. I can write a prompt to ask the LLM to produce a poem for me. But can I claim it as my own? Do I own the language that exists in its repository? This is where the issue of ethics and integrity comes in.

A culture of suspicion has arisen where we begin to comprehend the success of others as a compromised integrity. We think the singers have used auto-tuners, academics have used AI, and business houses have used manufactured data for their sales pitches. This is a culture where some assume a moral high ground to preach honesty and integrity.

It is like students turning in an assignment not realising that the teacher has added a hidden catchphrase to nab a misconduct. On Teachers’ Day, ChatGPT released a short video to celebrate teachers by saying, “We know.” The ad was supposed to tell the students not to think that they had outwitted their teachers by using LLM tools. Teachers have the foundational knowledge to know that their students are cutting corners. The temptation is too powerful. We are all beginning to outsource our tasks: students finishing assignments in 15 minutes and teachers preparing their lesson plans or class materials in equally short time. Information is processed at an unprecedented scale and speed. Our overreliance on devices has made it increasingly difficult to think on our own. We are rehearsing knowledge that is already in the repository, then producing it with some personal garnishing.

A representative from the leading plagiarism checker Turnitin told the conclave how the number of submissions to Organization Science had increased by 42 percent ever since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. Even the prestigious publishing outlet like Springer Nature retracted 2,923 papers in 2024. A Ukrainian paper mill network was found responsible for 1,517 fraudulent papers. On September 8, TBS Bangla ran an investigative report and talked to a Bangladeshi paper mill selling Q1 journal articles for TK 20,000-70,000.

So how do we pursue knowledge and retain trust and integrity in this age of AI? More importantly, how do we retain our human voice and agency at a time when everything can be outsourced? I return to the image of the house that survived Nepal’s flood. We need to build a foundation before we encounter the flood of information presented by AI. And that foundation must be built in the right environment.

We need to be AI-resilient, but thinking that we can be AI-proof will be foolish. Instead, we can adopt a product-process-presence model. If we consider an assignment to be a product, for instance, we need to check it for accuracy, disciplinary standards, and the evidence that it provides. Then there should be declarative options where the producer of the work must reveal how the product was made. Some journals now require the proposals, drafts, sources, prompt log and revisions made. The most important phase is the presence phase: where a learner must be able to defend the product, maybe through a viva or a brief presentation.

For such an ecosystem to grow, we need to apply the same standards to both teachers and students. Teachers must make the AI rules clear. Students need to know whether AI is completely prohibited or partially allowed. Whatever the case is, the feedback process must retain human agencies.

At an institutional level, policymakers must not create unrealistic pressures on their faculty members in the name of rankings and reputations to publish beyond their capabilities. The pressure chain prompts faculty members to salami-slice their works, acting like the proverbial fox repeatedly showing the same crocodile kid before consumption.

There is no glory in catching plagiarism after it has happened. The cop-and-robber game that the media likes to dress up as news is just the tip of the iceberg. The greater problem is our knowledge that the glacier is heating up. Whatever we know as our own will have a great fall. And if we all follow the fancied trend, we risk being washed away. The only way we can withstand the change is by making us ready for the next flood. AI can help us build faster, but only we can decide what is worth building and where we want to build next.

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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