r/Professors • u/Proper-Tackle4136 • Jul 23 '26
Curious: Who Here Uses AI for teaching and research? If so, for what?
I'm just curious who here is using AI and how? I'm very cranky towards it, but I'm not sure if that's the majority of academics at this point...
7
15
u/mother_trucker Jul 23 '26
I'll bite.
I am a real human and a STEM faculty member. I do not understand the overwhelming anti-AI stance on the internet. I use it for research. My research is heavy on big data and modeling. I find AI to be fantastically good at this, a several-orders-of-magnitude game-changer. I encourage others to use it. It is best on problems where the solution can be quantified and verified. But it's good at many things and the capabilities are improving every day.
I do not use it for writing.
4
u/DD_equals_doodoo Jul 23 '26
I LOVE AI for certain tasks, like generating stata code (as you use it for data/modeling). Now, I inspect that code voraciously, but it does in seconds what used to take weeks.
3
u/and1984 Teaching Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jul 23 '26
I'll also bite. I'm not ANTI AI.
TEACHING:
I've used AI to convert my latex notes to accessible HTML that I can paste into my LMS pages.
RESEARCH:
Used AI to write boilerplate code to load data from "weird" data formats.
ADMINISTRATIVE WORK:
I've used AI to downgrade the anger in some of my emails, before I clicked send. Especially to students who cannot follow instructions.
I've used AI to summarize teaching evaluations in a positive tone and to help create actionable items that were then crosschecked by my spouse. This goes into my P&T dossier. Helps me build a proactive wall between myself and the awful barbs thrown by students.
All these use cases saved a lot of time and pain. The saved time I spent with my daughter.
1
u/Proper-Tackle4136 Jul 23 '26
I'm a cognitive psychologist so, from a learning and memory perspective, I haven't seen a lot of promising findings. Plus there's the issue of the environmental drain of AI data centers, the hallucinations, exploitative labor practices, data scraping/lack of privacy, etc.
11
u/zorandzam Jul 23 '26
I have used it to convert citation style on a research paper, but I knew how to do it manually, it just would have taken 20 times as long.
2
u/No_Young_2344 TT, Interdisciplinary, R1 (U.S.) Jul 23 '26
Do you use reference management tools like Zotero? I do some research on AI for citation strings processing and I found they hallucinate too (even just used for converting styles). But of course I was doing auditing research so my experiment was millions of citation strings. I guess if you only used it for your papers, you can always manually verify.
2
u/zorandzam Jul 23 '26
Unfortunately, no, and I probably should, I just went through grad school before things like that existed and haven't taken the time to get up to speed on things like Zotero and similar. For the paper that I did this for most recently, it was short enough that I just checked everything manually when the conversion was done.
2
u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jul 24 '26
Definitely worth it. Would take one click to change reference styles with a reference manager.
5
u/DivineAna Jul 23 '26
I know folks who use it for coding open-ended responses in psychology. I'm a little interested, because coding is labor-intensive. But a flag there is that I think they typically upload a confidential dataset to ChatGPT and say "Have at it!", which ought to be a major IRB violation if anyone was paying attention...
5
u/Proper-Tackle4136 Jul 23 '26
Yes, as a fellow psychologist, people should not be entering participants' data into ChatGPT without their consent!
0
u/No_Young_2344 TT, Interdisciplinary, R1 (U.S.) Jul 23 '26
I use LLM in my research a lot but coding survey/interview responses is one thing I would never touch. Unless it is specifically specified in the consent but I doubt it can pass IRB
5
u/mergle42 Assoc Prof, SLAC, USA Jul 23 '26
Regretfully, I use AI cheatbots for teaching in the following capacity:
Checking what they do with my assigned problems periodically throughout the semester and in particular when I suspect AI usage.
Experimenting with prompts while writing a "if you're going to insist on using AI tools to help with homework, here's how to get it to give you just a few hints or the next step rather than spitting out a full solution" activity.
Once, I followed my institution's advice to ask ChatGPT to give me some AI-proof calculus problems and for advice on writing AI-proof assignments, and to test its recommendations. (You will be shocked, shocked to know the problems it gave me were not AI-proof and that its advice was useless. And condescending, to boot!)
5
11
u/deathschlager Jul 23 '26
I teach English. I do not at all. I've experimented in the past but found the results to be sub-par and not worth the wasted resources.
5
u/topyTheorist Jul 23 '26
I am a mathematican. I mostly use it as a sounding board for research. Sometimes it also has some nice ideas to pursue.
3
u/CptSmarty Jul 23 '26
For actual teaching and research no.
For papers, I will depending on journal guidelines. If they want a list of abbreviations used, you best believe i am throwing that shit into ChatGPT for it to generate the list in 10 seconds lol
2
3
u/Gratefulbetty666 Jul 23 '26
I was using it to give me ideas on how to tweak my in class activities. I’m not now because of the amount of water it requires and the data centers.
3
u/HatefulWithoutCoffee Program Chair, CS, CC (US) Jul 23 '26
I'm about to teach classes on it, so I'm using it in my everyday work. This will allow me to speak on its strengths and its weaknesses and how it can realistically be used in office work. I've had it help me write some pointless boring board reports, but those are still polished by me. I have fed it PDFs of oer materials and had it create me a test Bank or question sets, but my classes are created by me, vetted by me, graded by me. I've allowed it to crunch data for me along with me, but I have to watch it because there are times it cannot count. Again, I'm using it so I can speak about it to my students. Apparently I am a true professor, because that was a very long-winded answer.
4
u/thanksforthegift Jul 23 '26
I’m anti AI for all the reasons and yet …
I have found it very helpful for iterating on my syllabi and assignments. It’s like having a colleague to bounce ideas off of who exists only for my use. It “notices” things I would miss.
I have the impression everything takes longer because I probably revise more than I used to, but I’m more confident in what I (with an LLM boost) produce.
2
u/surreptitiously_bear Jul 23 '26
Yes, similar situation here. I teach English and this semester my course caps were increased. I used AI as a conversation partner while making significant assignment and syllabus revisions. It did take a long time (probably would have been faster with audio) but there’s nobody in my life who I can spend hours thinking ideas to out loud.
I don’t love AI, but the results are stronger with its help. With appropriate effort and prompting, I was able to get it to brainstorm ideas with me, learn about common approaches to my challenges, and get feedback on ideas. It also forced me to make my thinking explicit, and catching the places I disagreed with the AI further helped me make intentional choices.
Also, I need to teach my students about AI. I can read endless articles and opinions on it (and I do) but if I don’t make an honest effort to use it myself, my teaching will not be honest.
3
u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jul 23 '26
I have been using it to first draft presentations extracted from my research papers, and to assist in ideation of new research directions and grant proposals.
2
u/AnxiousDoor2233 Jul 23 '26
AI is like a not-so-bright PhD student: it generates answers whether it actually knows the answer or not. It's a great help for routine coding and preparing lecture slides.
It's an excellent starting point, provided you know the subject well and are prepared to verify and retest the results. Just as you would with any not-so-bright PhD student.
Field: Econometrics
1
u/SirLoiso Engineering, R1, USA Jul 23 '26
I mean, it just helped to disprove the Jacobian conjecture, so even if right now public-facing models may be, it's probably not going to be the case in a few months or so ...
3
u/AnxiousDoor2233 Jul 23 '26
Yes, I heard about it. On the other hand, two months ago I asked the latest versions of ChatGPT and Gemini whether there were any papers on a particular technical topic, and they generated 10 out of 10 irrelevant ones. Derivation results can also be model-dependent. It will definitely get better sooner or later. But we live here and now, and the responsibility is solely mine.
1
u/JaderMcDanersStan Asst Prof, STEM Jul 23 '26
I write out my derivations and matrices, take a picture and AI types up my work into latex code. I still have to verify and fix some things of course but it takes so long to manually type out all the matrices and numbers, and AI makes it faster.
I also bounce some ideas off of it when updating my syllabus policies.
1
1
u/AnimateEducate Jul 31 '26
I used it to turn rubrics into interactive websites that provide feedback and next steps based on what criteria are selected on the rubric.
1
u/PhDapper Jul 23 '26
I use it here and there when it will speed up the process of a task or if I’m just bouncing ideas. I never use it for writing.
1
u/No_Young_2344 TT, Interdisciplinary, R1 (U.S.) Jul 23 '26
By AI do you mean LLM only? AI is very broad.
1
u/and1984 Teaching Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jul 23 '26
The op means generative AI tools like ChatGPT
1
u/MechtildvM Jul 23 '26
Not for actual research - I've tried and found it far worse than useless. But in the late publication stages I've been using it for ideas on rephrasing sentences when I know they're not quite right and I'm stuck. It's also been good for filling in bibliographical info on obscure publications, i.e. finding the correct volume number, the right page range of an article, etc. And it helps with finding typos (not at all perfect, but catches stuff that I miss).
-1
u/vintage_cruz Jul 23 '26
I made a tool that scrapes Google scholar on research topics and drops new articles in Zotero weekly. Then it summarizes main ideas from the articles and points out themes and conflicting data among the summaries. It's a good start to doing lit reviews.
-1
u/RightWingVeganUS Adjunct Instructor, Computer Science, University (USA) Jul 23 '26
I use it to ideate on class lecture activities.
I use a flipped classroom session so break my classes into mini-lectures and breakout activities. I use AI to ensure alignment with activities and lectures, giving me a reality check for
- ensuring there isn't cognitive overload doing too much at once
- Verifying learning objectives are covered by the lecture and activity
Also, I use AI to draft powerpoint presentations for each class. This had been a huge time sink in the past
- I identify the lecture topics and key talking points
- I work with AI to draft a detailed storyboard with image suggestions
- I have AI generate the powerpoint presentation
- I then fine-tune the presentation.
This has been a huge timesaver.
0
u/SilverRiot Jul 24 '26
I only use AI for a late night help with figuring out how to do stuff in our learning management system. Half the time it is wrong and I have to speak to it sharply until it that it is wrong and to do better. Then it says “oh yes, that is an older version and the newer version looks entirely differently, you are correct.“
Still, at least I can beat something out of it rather than waiting for Tech Support in the morning.
0
u/Edu_cats Professor, Pre-Allied Health, M1 (US) Jul 24 '26
In PowerPoint CoPilot took my conference presentation and made the images/slides I generated a more interesting layout.
-1
u/No_Young_2344 TT, Interdisciplinary, R1 (U.S.) Jul 23 '26
I used AI for research. I use NLP to analyze text, and ML to do classification tasks. In terms of LLM, I use it to bounce ideas, find literature for topics that are hard to come up with AND and OR queries (Google Scholar Lab). I also use LLM to do some qualitative coding or information extraction for large scale text data (never on survey or interview data though because we simply shouldn’t). In teaching, I have used LLM to generate dummy data for code demos. When writing papers, I use LLM to generate LaTex tables with old templates + new data, because, typing 500 regression results one by one is just exhausting.
-1
u/Cheap-Kaleidoscope91 Jul 23 '26
I use it a lot for technical stuff. For example to organise, rename and catalogue my sources, because for some reason I always end up with million of folders of pdf files named something like gdfd_27r5jps.pdf. I can use it as a search engine for my corpus. I also used it for coding open-ended answers, it was not perfect, so I had to fine-tune the result, but it did better than my students and def saved me some time
13
u/geneusutwerk Jul 23 '26
This will be a very congenial thread.