The reassurance of ‘the human in the loop’ can be found in many places: in vendor marketing, institutional policies, and in wider discourse around AI. It’s become the standard response to concerns about AI making consequential decisions. But what does it mean in practice? If a marker glances at AI-generated feedback and clicks “accept”, was a human meaningfully in the […]
Category: News
Our May collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education What UK university AI policies actually do: A study of 96 institutions A new HEPI study of 96 UK university AI policies finds that 41% of institutions have no publicly accessible AI policy, while many existing policies prioritise compliance and misconduct processes over […]
Our April collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education AI literacy is not enough – universities must teach through disciplinary standards Annika Bautz argues that generic “AI literacy” modules don’t prepare students for AI-mediated work. Drawing on the University of Surrey’s plans to embed discipline-specific AI teaching across all programmes from September, […]
Our March collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education Educating the AI generation – institutional AI response is a human, not a policy challenge Drawing on sector roundtables, the article shows how higher education is grappling with AI’s impact on teaching and assessment. Rather than top-down rules, institutions need to foster curiosity, […]
Our February collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education As we embrace ‘efficient’ AI we risk adding more work on top As colleges race to embed AI and meet new inspection expectations, the sector may be underestimating the implementation burden. This piece argues that unless leaders actively remove other pressures, AI will […]
Our January collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education Generation AI: fears of ‘social divide’ unless all children learn computing skills As children grow up surrounded by AI, experts warn that failing to teach computing and AI literacy could deepen social inequality. This piece argues that understanding how AI works should be […]
Our December collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Education High quality learning means developing and upskilling educators on the pedagogy of AI This post highlights that if universities want genuinely high-quality learning with AI in the mix, they should invest just as much in upskilling educators as they do in new tools. […]
In September, I wrote a blog post advising against enabling Anthropic in Microsoft Copilot. The reason was that the integration was under completely separate terms and data processing agreements. Thankfully, Microsoft has listened to feedback and onboarded Anthropic as a subprocessor. Whilst this doesn’t significantly change the technical implementation, it completely changes the contractual side. […]
Our November collection of articles and announcements to share this month. Research Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy In this short paper, Dobariya & Kumar examine the impact of prompt politeness on large language model (LLM) performance. By rewriting 50 base questions into five tone levels (very polite – very rude) and testing them, the researchers […]
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AI in Research Newsletter (Autumn 2025)
Welcome to our latest roundup of updates, insights, and resources exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence in research and across the research sector. This roundup covers the latest news in AI, key developments on AI’s impact in research, policy, institutional stories and the voices of our communities. News & policy updates Aston University and […]