Amassing 900 million users weekly, as reported by OpenAI in February of this year, ChatGPT has become a right-hand tool for many in everyday life. With the accessibility of Artificial Intelligence increasing, found on most corners of the internet, the task of balancing the benefits and risks of the innovative tool has become a challenge for many students and third-level institutions.
The Times revealed in July of this year that the number of Irish students misusing AI has tripled since the 2023/24 academic year. With Generative AI rapidly evolving, how can institutions like Trinity keep up? And what do Trinity students have to say about AI’s place in our education?
Increasingly accessible, GenAI’s explosive use has become a serious challenge for third-level institutions, with almost 600 Irish college students found to have misused AI in their coursework and assessments during the academic year of 2025/26, according to The Times. This reported ‘misuse’ refers to the use of the tool to artificially generate assignments, falling under the plagiarism offence.
The third-level institutions with the highest number of confirmed AI misuses were the University of Galway, Technological University Dublin (TUD), and South East Technological University (SETU).
As for Trinity College Dublin, no data on the subject has been collected by the institution since the academic year of 2023/24, when 160 cases of plagiarism were reported, including AI misuse. According to The Times, this is due to the college shifting focus from AI detection software to “strengthening academic integrity by redesigning assessment strategies”.
Trinity has a comprehensive policy on AI and its uses in education, acknowledging its advantages while also emphasising the responsibility of students and staff as AI users to keep academic integrity and ethics at the forefront of all AI use.
As a “world leader in AI research”, Trinity recognises the advantages of AI and GenAI in how they “offer new opportunities for teaching, learning, assessment, and research”, according to the ‘College Statement on Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI in Teaching, Learning, Assessment, and Research’, which was issued this June. However, the college also recognises the tools’ undeniable pitfalls, as they present “significant and increasing challenges and risks” in relation to academic integrity, ethics, privacy, impartiality, intellectual property, and sustainability.
The document further states that Trinity supports students and staff in becoming “AI literate and fluent,” in efforts to not only allow them to harness its potential for enhancing teaching and learning, but also navigate the challenges and risks that come with it.
For instance, Trinity provides access to the AI tool Microsoft Copilot chat for students and staff. All prompts and responses are encrypted in this chat and are not stored or used to train other models, ensuring data protection.
Furthermore, the institution allows flexibility for each school “to customise their own discipline-specific practices” — whether that is complete prohibition, or allowed if its use is declared by students — as long as it aligns with the values and principles set forward by the college statement
The principles and values include striking a balance between “harness[ing] the potential of AI and Gen AI” while maintaining “responsibility, integrity, respect, transparency, and sustainability at all times”.
While the statement acknowledges that it is “impossible to ban [students’] use” of GenAI, it asks students and staff to fact-check information and always seek out primary sources as part of academic practice.
Furthermore, concerns outlined by the document in relation to AI include its use to generate plagiarism; unlawful uses such as sharing personal, private, or sensitive information about students or colleagues; factual errors and bias produced by AI; and its significant use of energy and resources. This mention of excessive energy use refers to the fact that data centres, used to power AI, could consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2030, according to United Nations News – a startling statistic that is almost triple the combined annual electricity use of over 650 million people across Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria.
The University Times spoke to several Trinity students to learn more about what they had to say about AI’s place in education and the startling figure of Irish college students misusing AI.
Junior Sophister English Literature and History student, Ryan Deane, shared his views on students’ use of AI technology.
“I think it’s honestly more common than people realise,” commented Deane, noting, however, that he does not use AI for essay writing purposes.
With the Schools of English and History discouraging AI use vehemently, Deane went on to express his surprise at an encounter he had, while on the train home from college, with a man who turned out to be a professor in the Religion Department: “He was speaking fairly positively about using [AI] as a tool rather than using it just to do your assignment. But like, largely I have avoided it. It’s drilled into you [across English and History] that if you use it in any respect, you’re going to get a zero.”
Although Deane deduced that AI can be used positively “with moderation and a lot of care,” he found it “depressing” to hear how AI misuse by Irish college students has tripled, particularly in the arts and humanities.
“It’s so intrinsic to who you are as a person. It’s a reflection of yourself, what you find your interests in, what you write about and how you write it”.
Deane continued, “if everyone is drawing from the same well, like, a kind of almost poisoned well of not necessarily accurate information, and the same information, then it’s negative for the discipline as a whole because you’re not getting people who are smart and can think for themselves, you’re getting a bunch of robots who parrot the same sort of thing, which is not the point of education and it’s not the point of learning.”
Deane concluded by recognising the challenge AI presents to institutions like Trinity, appreciative of their effort to combat its misuse.
“It would be hard, I imagine, to determine what is AI and what’s not…for them as an institution to determine what is AI and what is not AI”, he acknowledged, concluding: “I think it is good that they are looking into it.”
Senior Fresh student Liva Goldmann, studying History and Political Science, also took the time to share her views on AI and its place in education: “I personally do not support [AI] at all,” commented Goldmann, noting the “environmental impact” and “loss of creativity, human work, and appreciation for something made by humans for other people”.
Speaking about the AI policy conveyed by Political Science, Goldmann explained that, while it is discouraged, it is permitted under certain circumstances as long as it is declared by the student. The Department of Political Science’s handbook states, “the use of GenAI is permitted unless otherwise stated,” and ultimately aligns itself with the college statement on AI.
Permitted uses include summarising sources or using AI to help test the strength of your argument, “but obviously, things like source generation or source searching via AI, or complete writing of paragraphs or anything like that, that’s prohibited,” continued Goldmann.
Goldmann shares Deane’s sentiment that AI can be used positively in education, as long as it is used carefully, explaining that she occasionally uses the tool to summarise scientific articles, but assures that she always fact-checks and examines the sources.
“If used properly, it can come in handy, just to reduce the workload for college students”.
She continued: “I’d say that, if used in the right ways and if it’s taught how to be used correctly, it’s definitely helpful”. However, she concedes that “people have to be aware of what they are doing, how to use it, and still put in their own work…AI in academia can be helpful, but you definitely have to watch out how much you use it and for what exactly.”
Furthermore, while Goldmann agrees that the college’s AI policy has been effectively communicated, she believes more could be done to deter AI misuse. She listed workshops or courses as potential tools to “educate people on the usage of AI”, its harms, benefits and proper use, while encouraging individual work and effort.
Goldmann concluded the interview by sharing that she finds the increased number of Irish college students misusing AI, “a bit worrying.” Explaining that when she graduated from second-level education three years ago, AI was not as big of a thing for her, but now she sees it being used by friends in “everyday life.”
“People use it so often that I think they forget how to properly read up on things or to research things and stay curious…So I do think that it is a bit worrying because there is a loss of inter-human connection and just using your own brain.”
In consideration of the student testimonies and Trinity’s AI policy, it is evident that although AI has the potential to benefit the lives of students and staff in an academic setting, the positives are underpinned greatly by the increasing concern of its threat to academic integrity, human creativity and curiosity, and the environment. With Deane describing GenAI as a “poisoned well” of re-used information, and Goldmann concerned with losing “inter-human connection” if people continue asking ChatGPT for advice rather than their friends or professors, it begs the question: is it possible to compete with AI’s rapid evolution, or is it slowly consuming us?
