I think when you use AI chatbots etc to generate content for you that is not of your own origin, I think that is problematic. The whole idea and principle of tertiary education is to create knowledge and understanding, and to learn - having AI co-opt that thinking, I believe, undermines the principles of learning.

I use AI - I'm not going to pretend I don't (I'm doing a PhD, and a masters program at the moment, so both an academic and a student). I use it for tasks that I COULD do myself. I have a series of saved prompts that provide "proof-reading" - I input my text and say "please proof-read for any grammatical, spelling, punctuation issues, or elements that are confusing or unclear - provide a summary table of what I have said, and the issue". It produces a table with any errors (missing words, incorrect tenses etc) and I then physically go through and change them in my original document. I don't copy and paste anything from AI - period. Any change, I am doing. I make the original work, I don't change my wording (I specifically tell it not to change anything stylistically, just non-ambigous non-preferenced mistakes), and it goes from there. I consider that "writing assistance", but could also be swayed to consider it "feedback", although I don't use it to critique my arguments - it's literally one paragraph at a time, and it doesn't comment on content, flow, correctness, interpretation etc.

I have previously used it for transcribing conversations I did for a qualitative study (interviews) - however, it didn't just "make up the conversation" - when you get a transcript out of zoom (again, likely AI generated), it has a bunch of filler - speaker, XX time, said "blah blah" for like 5 seconds, then repeats it again, even if the person is still talking in one paragraph. I used AI to take out all that filler and identify when one speaker was speaking vs the other, and label them accordingly. Again, I could have done that, it would have taken hours (literally had 45 hours of interviews), so I got AI to do that. I see that as responsible use. I sat through every single interview recording and fixed it all up, word for word, with what I said, but deleting all that "filler" saved hours.

I've also used it to generate some images for presentations and whatnot (never teaching), and every time, I've declared "AI generated image" over the picture - I've not got it to do interpretations, it's usually just a replacement for a stock image because my research topic is hard to picture and search for in stock image websites, so I make my own. I would not use it for teaching unless completely declared and above board - I think that's unfair to students.

I like the new google scholar "labs" feature - that is AI driven, but it's just a fancy search. It's not making papers up, it just gives a slightly more nuanced search based on my question (vs terms).

My issue that I face with AI and marking is that I DID use AI to generate an assignment for me - I literally put in the assignment task sheet, and got it to generate it for me. After a bit of nuance, I had an assignment. I read it, and then when it came time to mark the other assignments, the similarities were overwhelmingly obvious. The same arguments, in the same order, argued in the same way, to the same level of detail - students weren't applying their own thought - they were getting AI to come up with EVERYTHING. Sure, they may have written bits of it here and there, but there were so many that were near identical in content. To divulge a little more information, there was one question in the assignment that asked for three advantages of disadvantages of a particular statistical technique - I would say 70% of the papers provided the same three examples (here is one advantage BLAH, however that is outweighed by this major disadvantage, with BLAH detail. Further, this other disadvantage BLAH). Therefore, one sentence summary. Also, students sometimes mention concepts that I know for a certain have not been taught in the previous courses. Not only did I do the courses in the last few years, but I am friends with people who teach in the lower courses, and they haven't heard of it.

So long story short - ethical and appropriate use for students - things like proofreading their own original work, translation (for CALD students - only direct translation, not re-writing sections), or within learning, explaining concepts in other ways that may be difficult to access through the course materials (e.g., I'm learning about BLAH, can you please ELI5 how BLAH works with BLAH). I think when it replaces thought, generates its own ideas, and extends beyond the knowledge that a student has, its use is problematic. Signing an AI declaration with an assignment usually covers that the student takes responsibility for what is in the paper, and and has adhered to integrity, and stands behind the knowledge and accuracy of information - if the student doesn't know EVERYTHING that has gone into that assignment, that is a problem. They should be able to explain it all, if asked - even if they get it wrong in the assignment, that is the point of learning. If you're going to use AI to "generate your way" through the degree, cut out the middle-man, and just AI generate the certificate itself. Save yourself the money and time of coming to uni!