Lmst

Webinar: Is it possible for academics to use LLMs in a responsible and ethical way?

The emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for academia. While these technologies offer powerful capabilities to support scholarship, their thoughtless adoption could undermine the very foundations of academic work. This talk introduces a framework for incorporating generative AI into academic practice in ways that enhance rather than replace human thought. Drawing on extensive practical experience, it demonstrates how conversational agents can serve as intellectual interlocutors rather than mere productivity tools, while examining the broader implications of these developments for the future of universities. There is an urgent need to establish what constitutes responsible and ethical use of LLMs for academics, which means taking seriously the argument that this might not be possible.

#GenerativeAIForAcademics

Generative AI and the emergency remote scholarship of the Covid-19 pandemic

This is an extract from Generative AI for Academics

During those moments when change is taking place, it becomes easier to reflect upon the technology our scholarship depends on. We notice it far more during these periods of change than we do once it has faded into the background of our working environment. In his commencement speech at Kenyon College, the novelist David Foster Wallace (2005) began with a parable that been a repeated favourite of bloggers over the years:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The point Wallace was making is that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”. For academics our dependence upon technology is one such reality, it is so intimately relied upon that we easily ignore how integral it is to what we do. We get frustrated when it breaks, upgrade devices in pursuit of better experiences and sometimes talk to each other about practical issues we encounter. There’s a particular sort of infantile rage which otherwise sedate academics can express when the office printer doesn’t work that has always fascinated me. But the manner in which our scholarship is digital at this point tends to go unremarked upon, apart from during those times when a dramatic shift is enforced upon us.

The enforced digitalisation of the Covid-19 pandemic was one such event, we all became digital scholars by default because lockdown restrictions squeezed out those remaining arenas which were not entirely reliant on the digital (Carrigan, 2021). But rather than being the prelude to a newly reflective approach to digital technology, the emergency digital scholarship of the pandemic has faded. In using the term I’m drawing a connection to the emergency remote teaching which dominated pedagogy during the pandemic (Nordmann et al, 2020). It was a pragmatic response to circumstance that had little relationship to the rich repertoire of digital education which preceded the pandemic (Weller, 2020). Yet for many academics online learning is synonymous with the hastily improvised Zoom meetings and self-recorded videos of the pandemic, contributing to an understandable impulse to revert to the pre-pandemic norm. The same I suggest is true of digital scholarship, with the unwelcome technological reliance of the crisis now shaping the unexamined practice of academics in a hybrid work culture. When we are adjusted to the technical systems we work within, it “fades into the background, forgotten as it disappears into everydayness, just as, for a fish, what disappears from view, as its ‘element’ is water” (Stiegler, 2019: loc 887). But when that adjustment breaks down as the system changes, we are confronted with the fragile nature of the tools we use and our dependence on them. These are moments in which professional cultures can inadvertently establish practices which get locked in before the change dissipates. The challenge of GAI is an invitation for academics to grapple with the digitalisation of their practice more broadly. But the track record in many disciplines and fields does not give cause for optimism.

This matters for academics because technology is a disrupter of professional jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988). Each new development offers alternative ways to address the challenges traditionally within the purview of that profession. By advocating a reflexive approach to GAI, as an interlocutor rather than a tool, I am advocating a creative exploration of how our problem-solving activity might be changed and our professional jurisdiction redefined. This does not mean standardising our use of GAI, which I suspect would be impossible across diverse disciplines and fields, but rather recovering common questions of professional purpose which unite what we do as people who produce and communicate knowledge. While the purposes underlying our work might often recede in the mundane reality of university life, there are nonetheless purposes to research, teaching, service and engagement. These are values which can guide us in a complex and uncertain landscape.

#digitalScholarship #GenerativeAIForAcademics #pandemicUniversity #PostPandemicUniversity

🖥️ Are you running a reading group on Generative AI for Academics?

I’m joining an online reading group in Sweden tomorrow who have been reading Generative AI for Academics together over recent weeks.

If you’re doing something similar, I’d be happy to come and discuss the book with you – just get in touch here.

#GenerativeAIForAcademics #markCarrigan #readingGroup

Another review of Generative AI for Academics

Really thoughtful and balanced review of Generative AI for Academics from The Sociological Review’s Emma Craddock 😊

This book offers a very thorough and thoughtful consideration of the use of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and Claude, in academia. It successfully balances intellectually rigorous debate with practical tips and guidance. It will be especially valuable for those unfamiliar with using these tools, while even more experienced users are likely to pick up some new ideas and benefit from engaging with the broader ethical and practical discussions. I particularly appreciated the emphasis on treating these programmes as conversation partners rather than replacements for our own intellectual labour, and the encouragement to use them critically and alongside other forms of academic work. However, significant ethical questions remain, and as the author notes, once you start using AI, it can become hard to imagine working without it. Therefore, I offer a word of caution – think hard before diving in and use this book to help you to assess the benefits and costs, alongside further research.

#EmmaCraddock #GenerativeAIForAcademics #TheSociologicalReview

Webinar: Thinking with Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically

DARIAH Friday Frontiers seminar series
Friday 2nd May, 4pm IST / 5pm CEST / 6pm EEST

Title: Thinking With Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically

Speaker: Mark Carrigan, University of Manchester

Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/…/register/xbJkSexDQuq_0asz4rMdZg

Abstract

Speaker Biography

Dr Mark Carrigan FRSA FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (DTCE) and co-lead of the DTCE Research and Scholarship group. Trained as a philosopher and sociologist, his research aims to bridge fundamental questions of social ontology with practical and policy interventions to support the effective use of emerging technologies within education. He has written or edited eight books, including Social Media for Academics, published by Sage and now in its second edition. His latest book ‘Generative AI for Academics’ was released by Sage in December 2024. He jointly coordinates the Critical Realism Network while being active in the Centre for Social Ontology and a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. He is a board member for a range of publications, including Civic Sociology, the Journal of Digital Social Research and Globalisation, Societies and Education.

#generativeAI #GenerativeAIForAcademics

Two reviews of Generative AI for Academics

Notes from Mirjam Sophia Glessmer on reading the book:

The other day I read something (that I cannot find again) along the lines of “GenAI creates art for people who hate art, music for people who hate music, reading for people who hate reading”, and I have been thinking about that a lot. I have explored what GenAI can and cannot do (for example regarding discussing workshop planning, but also to help with analysing qualitative data [don’t use it — we explain why in this article Rachel Forsyth and I just published]). I have never used it to create “art” or to write for me, and that is because both graphical and written forms of expressing myself feel very personal and very important to me and I cannot imagine delegating either, not even to professional artists or writers. Unless you can read my mind and do EXACTLY what I envision, stay away from my writing and art! That said, I pre-ordered Mark Carrigan’s new book, “Generative AI for Academics”, already last summer. Similarly to his previous book, “Social Media for Academics“, it seems a bit risky to read an actual, printed book on such a quickly changing technology as GenAI, but I found that it takes a big enough perspective that at least the current landscape still seems well described.
https://mirjamglessmer.com/2025/02/05/currently-reading-generative-ai-for-academics-by-carrigan-2024/

And from Scientist Sees Squirrel in a great three-book reflection:

I’ll start with Mark Carrigan’s Generative AI for Academics (Sage, 2024). This is the most bullish of the three about potential uses for the technology. Carrigan outlines ways for academics to use LLMs in their work – including, but not limited to, their writing. I especially appreciate Carrigan’s argument that the way to go is to find ways to think with LLMs rather than using LLMs as a substitute for thought. This is very much in the spirit of what I’ve argued: that too many folks are conceiving of LLMs as substituting for writing skills. Instead, I think we should, and can, find ways they can be used to build writing skills.. Among the uses for LLMs Carrigan explores are “rubberducking” (explaining your ideas to an LLM to test and polish your ability to explain them, just as you might talk your ideas out to a friend, or your cat, or a rubber duck); asking an LLM to summarize your draft, using its errors to diagnose gaps in what you’ve written; and using an LLM to assist with translation of text between audiences (paper to blog post, for example). In each case, Carrigan suggests that the LLMs can help you think – and while they might also save you time and effort, it’s the thinking help that might matter most.
https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2025/02/11/three-books-to-sum-up-where-were-at-with-ai-tools-for-writing/

Thank you both, I really enjoyed reading these! 😊

#generativeAI #GenerativeAIForAcademics

https://soundcloud.com/mark-carrigan/an-introduction-to-genai-for-academics-in-15-minutes

Find out more about the book here: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/generative-ai-for-academics/book288289

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/an-introduction-to-genai-for-academics-in-15-minutes/

#generativeAI #GenerativeAIForAcademics

I wrote a few days ago about the hasty formulation of a book project stunting my enjoyment of writing. I felt a momentum developing in this blog series, an energy in my writing reflected in the energy of the feedback I was receiving. It felt like there was a value to be found in making this a more formal project, captured in my own enjoyment of writing it and the worth which other people were seemingly finding in the series. There was also the perverse lure of being prolific, the odd satisfaction which came from having written a book in a matter of months last year, finding a refuge in immersion when all sorts of things were going wrong in my personal life.

In retrospect I can see how this immersion tied together desire and drive in a powerful way. It provided me with a way to make a beginning from a series of endings, providing a concrete response to the diffuse recognition that I needed a mid career research agenda, actualised through ritualised immersion in writing in libraries, parks and gardens. In a real way it eased me into a new phase of my life, helping me put a shitty few years behind me.

It left me newly aware of how writing can be a locus of personal change, in ways that might not feel entirely clear to you at the time. The book suddenly presented itself to me as a potential whole but I think it could only be animated as an object because of the wider changes underway within my life. This is how I described the transition in the first paragraph of the acknowledgments for Generative AI for Academics:

I’m usually a messy and exploratory author who needs to start writing in order to work out what I’m trying to say. Yet the idea for this book popped into my head fully formed in May 2022 when I was relaxing into a morning swim. I was suddenly struck by the parallels between the practical challenges GAI poses for academics and the issues raised by social media which drove my work in the 2010s. It is a project which emerged after a strange year of personal upheaval that was simultaneously the most professionally rewarding period of my life. The Manchester Institute for Education has been a remarkably collegial environment in which to settle into the lectureship I had been determinedly avoiding since finishing my PhD in 2014. It is hard to imagine a more encouraging environment as my fascination with GAI developed. It is a genuinely warm and friendly place in which to work, which is a remarkable achievement reflecting a continual commitment from my colleagues in the difficult context of the neoliberal university.

Hence when I felt a familiar upsurge of energy about a nascent project, immediately throwing myself into it only to find out it was the wrong project pursued much too quickly. The difference was the wider background of turmoil which meant the previous book could be a locus of desire. I needed an object for my drives around which they could rotate compulsively, giving me something to jump into frequently and forcefully throughout the day. Articulating the project made it possible to immerse myself in a way that an open-ended exploration wouldn’t have been able to. In contrast when everything in my life is pretty good, with the partial exception that I’m knackered, it’s not possible to tie drive and desire in this way. The shifting coordinates of my life last summer created a need for a structure which could hold my focus and provide an outlet for my energy. In contrast I’m pretty satisfied with how my life is unfolding at this point, with the corollary that I want to be less cognitively occupied by my work rather than more. I want to expand the horizon of my drives rather than contract them, with summer being the perfect point to do this.

(Which makes the idea that I was going to write another book this summer obviously foolish, particularly as I have a 90% finished theory book which I’m contractually obliged to deliver by September 🙄)

Despite having written this blog for nearly fifteen years, I’ve only recently had the language to really analyse how I relate to it. The open-ended character of blogging, the lack of a specified genre and the immediacy of the process make it a locus of drive satisfaction rather than desire. It’s a place where I can write as an end in itself, enjoying the peculiar pleasure which comes from capturing my fringe thoughts. This is satisfying to me in quite a primitive way: an obsessive form of cognitive decluttering, satisfying my curiosity in a way which evades reliance on the Other and the vague feeling of empowerment which comes from practicing my capacity to articulate thin ideas in thick yet precise language. This series is a bit of a departure in that I’ve given this practice a shape, framing each post as a contribution to an emerging whole.

But I think the reason it’s proved so energising is that this partial invocation of the imaginary (a series which will have an existence as a whole, seen by myself and others – “what will it mean to them? what will it mean to me? what sort of person would write such a series?” etc) also provides an outlet for the drives. I am circling around the topic of enjoying writing in a rather disorganised way, literally just responding to the most proximate fringe thought when I sit down to write a post. The fact I am enjoying writing these posts about enjoying writing creates of a feedback loop, generating new fringe thoughts but also energising the process. It is I think quite an interesting example of Lacan’s peculiar sense of sublimation, which “elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing”. The circuit I am more or less locking myself within imbues the process with a dignity which further animates my rotation around it.

This is a long-winded way of making a simple point: not everything you write has to become something. In fact the pressure to become something can stunt the writing on which that becoming depends. If you write from drive rather than desire, from the mundane satisfactions which writing brings rather than fantasies of where it will lead, everything else will take care of itself. Obviously you need to formulate projects sometimes if you want something to actually happen beyond your notebook, document or blog. But you should tread lightly in this process, which I thought I knew this but forgot over the course of last year. Handle your ideals with gloves, as Nietzsche once put. The process of knotting together the satisfactions of writing with a desire to provide it with a final form can easily go wrong. If it does the enjoyment of writing can suddenly prove frustratingly elusive.

(I initially wrote ‘suffering’ rather than ‘something’ in the title, which I wanted to record as my favourite writing-related freudian slip)

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/31/how-to-enjoy-writing-19-not-everything-you-write-has-to-become-something/

#GenerativeAIForAcademics #Nietzsche #writing

I’m increasingly aware of how odd it might appear that Anthropic’s Claude is part of my intellectual lifeworld. I talk to it on a near daily basis about my work, in a similar way to how I talk with collaborators about what I’m doing. These conversations are obviously rather different in their form and frequency, with a myopic quality to the conversations I have with Claude in contrast to the circling around issues of mutual intellectual interest which characterises conversations with collaborators. The conversations with Claude are more frequent yet shorter, less intense but not as rewarding. The risk in talking about conversational agents as part of your intellectual lifeworld, as showing up in a way comparable to human collaborators, is that it might sound as if you’re erasing the differences between them or suggesting one can replace the other. In contrast I experience it as simply increasing the diversity of the dialogues available to you, enabling you to have different kinds of conversations which suit different kinds of purposes.

The problem is that it’s hard to specify in advance how you can use conversational agents as an interlocutor. By interlocutor I mean “a person who takes part in a dialogue or conversation”. Obviously Claude is not a person, as I’m trying to underscore by my insistence on using ‘it’ in my references to this system. But my point is that you can relate to it as an interlocutor, rather than saying it is one. You can address it as a conversational partner in a remarkably similar way to a human interlocutor. With the more recent models* (GPT 4 and then Claude 3 Opus) there is now the capacity for it to respond in a way that is remarkably similar to a human interlocutor. In fact its intellectual breadth far exceeds that of any human interlocutor, even if its ‘knowledge’ (which of course is ultimately pattern-recognition and transformation) is more shallow than that of any domain expert.

I suggest in chapter 4 of Generative AI for Academics that it provides a new way of encountering ideas. It provides new modes through which you can reflect on ideas, connect them and write about them:

Treating GAI as an interlocutor can serve a similar function to Russell’s planting ideas. For example, I have spent the last few days thinking about the Whisper AI functionality which is now built into the ChatGPT iOS application, enabling voice commands with a reliability which far exceeds any other system I have experienced, reflecting on what this means for how we relate to conversational agents. The capacity to talk to ChatGPT, through the medium of speech rather than writing, changes the dynamics of the writing process. I routinely find that ideas occur to me when I am on the move: “Not with my hand alone I write: My foot wants to participate” as Nietzsche (1974: 52) once put it. But I found dictating to ChatGPT particularly amenable in the morning, often in a chunk of twenty minutes or so before I leave for work, producing a response which I would either read on the tram or return to later in the day. I have found it a quick and convenient way of planting ideas in Russell’s sense, even if it doesn’t quite match the intensity of the process he describes. It enables me to quickly record an idea, to externalise it in a way which is accessible later. When I return to it I often find new insights and perspectives, as if the seeds had been growing in my mind since I dictated it earlier in the day. The responses which ChatGPT provides are often useful but the simple act of dictation is itself the main point. It also enables the dictation to be analysed and presented in ways which match my needs, such as categorising ideas into different sets of bullet points and classifying themes using bold and italics.
It also provides an alternative means of engaging with the project when I either could not or did not want to sit down and write. This switching between modes of writing paralleled the feeling I often find when switching between cafes and libraries every couple of hours reenergises me during an intensive day of writing. If you share the experience that introducing variety into your thinking and writing, in the sense of where you do these activities and how you do them, helps improve your enjoyment of the process and the outcomes then GAI can be helpfully understood as a way to expand the horizon of these activities. It provides new ways to think and write, as well as enabling you to think and write in context which would have previously been difficult, such as walking to work. If you haven’t tried this then I’d suggest doing so before you draw a conclusion. It might not work for you but you won’t know until you try.

My point is not that this should replace existing modes of thinking and writing. But rather that it can supplement them, contributing to a more varied and thriving ecology of ideas within which your creative work can take place. By expanding the range of ways in which you can work with ideas, it creates more space for non-linear creativity enabling you to keep in touch with the feel of an idea and pursue it wherever it takes you. It gets at the essence of what I’m trying to argue in this series: enjoying writing involves an interplay between limits and creation in which the former creates the conditions for the latter, while the latter relies on the former to give it shape and keep it sustainable. If you’re unsure where to get started, past this blog post into Claude 3 Opus or Chat GPT 4** and ask it to give you suggestions about how to get started on using generative AI as an interlocutor to support your writing.

*Until GPT 4 I was vaguely sceptical of the implications of generative AI. I believed it would have a significant impact through political-economic force of will, but I wasn’t entirely persuaded of the sociocultural significance of the underlying technology.

**I would honestly suggest it’s not worth trying to use GPT 3.5 or the weaker Claude models for serious intellectual work. If you’re at all interested then pay the $20 and try it for a month, in order to make an informed decision.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/10/how-to-enjoy-writing-14-using-generative-ai-as-an-interlocutor/

#claude #creativity #generativeAI #GenerativeAIForAcademics #limits #writing

#GenerativeAIForAcademics

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