What generative AI tools should I encourage or allow students to use?
Microsoft Copilot for Edge browser is available to all staff and students free of charge through the University Microsoft licence. When using Copilot for Edge, you and your students should log in with your university email. This provides you with commercial data protection, meaning your chat history is not saved, and the data is not used to train AIs, ensuring that university inputs remain secure. It also increases the number of responses you can get from Copilot. We recommend for the time being using Copilot if you are asking your students to engage with AI in order to minimise data and privacy concerns, and support equitability. We recognise that Copilot for Edge may not be as powerful as some other generative AI tools and are therefore exploring whether other services can be made available to staff and students.
If CoPilot does not meet your needs, popular free LLMs you may wish to consider include:
- ChatGPT from OpenAI
- Claude from Anthropic
- Gemini from Google (formerly Bard)
- Pi from Inflection
- Llama2 from Meta
Please be mindful of the drawbacks of using these services, including data privacy concerns. It is also important to note that most generative AI companies offer premium subscription versions that can impact equitability. If you instruct your students to use a specific generative AI tool, also instruct them on what version of that tool they must use (such as the free version) and be mindful that the premium versions may give better outputs. This means that such tools may be better used formatively.
Particular caution is required with data protection and information security where students also hold staff roles, since these students may have access to confidential or personal information. Staff should ensure that such information is not submitted by students to any public or private LLM generative AI service or product, unless those products have been officially onboarded by IT services.
Note: some disabled students may receive access to premium AI tools, such as Grammarly’s AI version, to aid their studies. Should these disabled students opt to keep the AI feature enabled, they are expected to use such tools in line with the University’s Academic Integrity policy. You may wish to consider this when determining the category of AI use for your assessment and the information you give to students to ensure that all students are clear about what they can and cannot do. Premium AI tools should not replace the need for students to generate their own academic ideas, arguments, and solve problems.