Using AI: university and the workplace

In this episode we talk to students and professionals at Digifest 2024. They discuss how they incorporate AI into their studies and work, while sharing their thoughts on its effectiveness

Participants

In order of first appearance:

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
• Hannah Pryor - student at Queen's University Belfast
• Callum McCallion - student at Ulster University
• Callum Upton - student at Aston University
• Abigail Hamilton - mechanical engineering instructor
• Bodhini Pulwansa - programme manager, Leeds City College
• Jason Thomas - deputy head of digital, the RNN Group  
• Caroline Seubert - the lead creative developer working in apprenticeships for engineering
• Daniel Ashton - senior technical specialist for XR Technologies, Sheffield Hallam University

Transcript

Emily Slade: Hello and welcome to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts Prospects. I’m your host, Emily Slade and this episode is mostly brought to you from Digifest 2024, a two day event held by JISC, hosting keynote speaker sessions, panels and workshops looking at the future landscape of the education sector.

Our team were on the ground interviewing people about artificial intelligence; how it influences their work or studies, how they use it, and what they think about it.

Meet Hannah, an undergraduate law student in her third year at Queen's University Belfast. We began by asking how she uses AI alongside her studies.

Hannah Pryor: It's changed well a lot of the writing parts of my assignments, so I don't tend to use AI for my research too often. But when it comes to actually putting essays together, which is very heavily essayed driven during a law subject, I tend to use it as a synonym finder. So I might put into. I might have used interests so many times in my essay, put it into ChatGPT, get it to give me a list of synonyms for that. So I usually use it to assist my writing and then as a spell check and grammar check at the end.

I'm actually not very explored in the different generative AI platforms that that are. I have only used ChatGPT. I know there's a lot of other ones out there that may be more beneficial to my subjects. I know that ChatGPT can be limited for legal research particularly, but yeah, I haven't explored enough yet. So I would like to.

I tend to use it as a like difference to Google search basically, so I can put in a more complex question that searching into Google or Safari or something won't be able to understand. It will just pick out keywords from it and I just find it streamlines that. And so I can just like dump all the questions I have in my head into a generative AI platform and it'll give me an actual answer for me. It'll work out kind of the mess that the question had been.  

Emily Slade: We then asked what is the worst thing about using Chat GPT?

Hannah Pryor: How it makes up legal cases and statute. And it just it isn't good for actual law knowledge at the moment and especially because the law is ever changing and it's like developing every single day. And especially the free version of ChatGPT is limited in its database so it doesn't know what to date things. So it might be telling you this is the law, but it changed like a week ago in another case, so it doesn't keep giving you up to date answers.

Emily Slade: And finally we asked what her advice would be to any student new to AI.

Hannah Pryor: I think first of all turn to any university guidelines that you've got, just to know what you can actually use it for at the time, even though these are changing quite often. And but then when you actually get to use it, use it as a starting point and not your finished piece, and use it as a tool to assist your work rather than be the thing that writes the work for you.

I think one of the big things is that in essay writing you, you will be better than what a generative AI platform can write. You have done the research, you have done the lectures, you've had information from professors about how to write an essay. So you will be better at the actual critical thinking and thoughts than ChatGPT would be. But it doesn't say that you can't use it for ideas and starting points, and as a tool that might help you to craft the best possible answer you can.

Emily Slade: Callum McCallion is a computer science student, in his final year at Ulster University. We asked him how AI has changed the way he studies.

Callum McCallion: Well, it's allowed me to develop a lot of skills quite quicker. For example, in the final year we have four different modules, 4 different 4 new skills that we have to try to balance it once. It's allowed me to take those skills and develop in a much rapid pace by developing in more personalised manner. So we have large classes, sometimes 140 people in the class it's being taught the one single way. I don't, I may not understand that there's some other students may not understand in that specific way. So it allows us to take the actual course content and learn it in our own way. In a more personalised approach, the whole thing allows you to grasp skills a lot easier than those other people.

I use multiple different AI for different use cases. While they're image generation that could use DALL.E sometimes use Claude whenever I'm helping create structures for my reports. And then I find that GPT for example, is much better at code debugging and code generation. So it basically depends on the use cases. And some of these actual ai’s itself has multiple different models for multiple different use cases, so there's a whole landscape of them and I feel like a lot of people aren't aware of that. They think it's just a plug and play with GBT and that's all you're going to get. But that's not the case. It's it's got it's completely, completely wide wide range that you have to be made aware of and it could be a very specific use case. But I do believe the likes of Claude for example is quite good for human readability and for creating reports. But when it comes to more coding aspects you can't focus on other models for example

I think the best thing about it is time management and that efficiency it's allowing me to take months off my learning process essentially allow me to develop skills in away I could never believe to be quite honest with if I have the learner skill for my final project for example might waste two weeks training actually do research on this kind of test about with it but then plug in exactly what I want. What it doesn't want to learn and learn that in the more personalised way and it's just the speed of of skill development has has skyrocketed. Frankly you should take a long time and they get used to something and the developer skill and then a lot of time would have been wasted. But now I'm able to develop myself skills on the side based on time with developing those kind of hard skills such as maybe JavaScript or whatever. It might take a few years to do that but but now I'm able to do it my own way. And the way that clicks for me, essentially.

The  worst thing about a is not enough people know about it. Again, some people there's always gonna be bad people out there who are going to use it in the wrong way. As long as we're aware of what can happen and what can be done with that, we can create safeguards. But again, I think the worst thing about it is just not enough people know about it. It's just people are feared of it. It can create a sort of intimidation factor which shouldn’t be the case as long as people are made aware of of the good and the bad. It shouldn't fear, you know, it's it's something that's beneficial to everyone in the world, no matter what it is you do, no matter what this case you may have for it. But I think the actual resources out there available given by educators, they're not good enough. They need to be. They need to be expanded on and they need to remove fear. Essentially, behind that.

Emily Slade: And again, we asked what his advice would be to any student new to AI.

Callum McCallion: I would say, hey uh, definitely take it with a pinch of salt. It's not going to create the final drop for you. It's not gonna, it's not gonna give you what you looking for. You have to know what you're looking for and you have to do with it, analyse what you receive and work with that. It's not a replacement of yourself. It's essentially an assistant or an extension to yourself. It's it's the difference between having a calculator and not having a calculator when solving a math equation you know it's it's there as a tool.

Emily Slade: Callum Upton is a PhD student in his third year at Aston University. His project is biochemistry related, looking at developing a new method of drug encapsulation and delivery based off of a biological macromolecule that's already available. We asked him how he uses AI alongside his studies.

Callum Upton: So I use AI a lot for finding resources to use in my PhD or in papers that I've been writing. So the main one to use is Perplexity. So I'll plug in my research question or question I'm looking for the answer for. So one I might use quite commonly is what's the structure of [ABC13?], which is the protein I look at.

What's really good about Perplexity is it gives you the sources that it uses to inform its answer. Now I pretty much ignore the answer because the danger with AI is it might be slightly altered, you kind of have to take it with a pinch of salt, but what's good is the sources have taken me directly to the paper that I'm looking for. I don't have to sift through PubMed or Google Scholar, it's just directly there. I also use design AI quite frequently for making posters, so I'm generally very busy all the time. If I can make a poster in 10 minutes rather than two hours that's had a significant value to you know, my work life.

Emily Slade: We asked what the best thing about using AI is.

Callum Upton: It just makes everything you do significantly more efficient, but also to the same quality as it would have been done previously. So going back to the Perplexity example, being able to find the perfect, the exact research paper I'm looking for in only 5 seconds rather than 30 minutes, going looking at a paper on Pub Med quickly giving it skim read. OK, no, that's not the one. Let's go back, look at another paper on Pub Med, skim read. OK, that's not the one. Let's go back. It's just it's it's made everything so much more efficient. So I can rather than say I have a two hour block for reading papers, I could have found five really high value research outputs that can inform my research project, rather than spending that two hours sifting for a million papers, only getting one good one at the other end.

Emily Slade: And the worst thing.

Callum Upton: I think the worst thing is, I can imagine, kind of that inequity. So if some, some people from, say, a more affluent background, they might have the money to put into getting these premium products, which gives them a better service and you can also view that as an unfair advantage. So there's kind of a digital poverty aspect to AI as well.

Emily Slade: And any advice to students who are new to AI.

Callum Upton: Don't view it as cheating, or don't view it as something you should feel guilty about, because it's at all. And even in the last year, the attitudes towards AI have changed a lot. So I know students I was working with a year ago. If they were using AI it might be a bit more kind of hush hush, whereas now mid workshop like a student might go ohh look. I've used AI and I found this answer for that particular research question that you've got on the board over there. So even in in a year, the perspectives already changed. So kind of don't feel thanks for listening, don't feel guilty, embrace it. It's going to be a tool that everyone's going to be using. Ohh. Well, everyone's already using it now, but even more so in 2,3,4,5 years time.

Emily Slade: Let's move away from university now and take a look at how AI is being incorporated into the workplace.

Abigail Hamilton: I’m Abigail Hamilton, I’m a mechanical engineering instructor. So I deliver a pretty vast curriculum from other safety right through to mechanical principles. I think AI is certainly within our framework, but at our level hasn't quite cascaded down yet. I think it's something that we talk about in terms of assessment and how AI may change how we assess as assessors. But it's not immediately on the, on our on our horizon I would say.

Bodhini Pulwansa: My name is Bodhini Pulwansa and I work for Leeds City College as a programme manager.

Emily Slade: We asked how has or will AI influence of change your job.

Bodhini Pulwansa: It already has. It's going, so I actually support a lot of content creation and lesson planning. So this could be for our mentor staff members as well as teachers really. And it starts with that. It helps me with my day-to-day planning and I'm currently doing an apprenticeship myself, so all of my research actually sourced via either Gemini or ChatGTP.

Jason Thomas: I'm Jason Thomas, I'm the new deputy head of digital at the RNN Group. I love AI. Ever since it came out, I've been using it quite a lot. I think as a lot of people mentioned, it's much more efficient, help us get our work life balance back. But I think it's probably one of the new technologies that you can actually get behind, and staff can get on board with it and see how it influences them, and their learners really easily.

Emily Slade: And the best thing about AI?

Jason Thomas: It would definitely be prompt engineering, I think, especially with AI. If you can get that right, you can access a wide range of AI tools. Ask the right question. Get the right answer.

Caroline Seubert: I'm Caroline Seubert, I'm the lead creative developer working in apprenticeships for engineering. So AI has a massive role in my job and particularly over the last 18 months, we use it on the day-to-day basis. It's not taking away from us - any of the work, but it's just enhancing what we do, timesaving, helping us to create content and we're just using it as a different sort of asset in our toolkit.

Daniel Ashton: My name's Daniel Ashton I'm a senior technical specialist for XR Technologies, at Sheffield Hallam University. How has AI influenced or changed your job? Quite a lot I think. AI everything that's sort of we're looking at from a technical perspective, the technology, the software AI has been built into that. So learners are getting that sort of first hand experience with that technology, but it's also allowing us to use that to sort of help support teaching and learning the elbow support rather than directly with students as well. So has already has had influence.

Emily Slade: That’s all the interviews from Digifest 2024 - thank you to everyone who got involved and shared their thoughts. If you'd like to share you thoughts on AI or let us know how you're incorporating it into your studies - or if you have any questions about this episode, you can email us at podcast@prospects.ac.uk. You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok, all the links are in the description. Make sure you give us a follow wherever you get your podcasts, and if you’re enjoying Future You make sure to leave us a review. Thanks very much for listening and we'll see you next time.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

Find out more

• Take a look at big data courses.
• Listen to How artificial intelligence can help endangered species | with LJMU.
• Leave us a review.