Abstract

Working with AI in Postgraduate Research: Embracing Cognitive Demand
Postgraduate students are becoming more comfortable outsourcing many tasks in their research to generative AI (GenAI). They pick up these shortcuts from their peers, their mentors, social media, and from tutorial videos explaining the best ways to use AI agents to get the results that you want.
Research supervisors need to emphasise to their students now, more than ever before, that it is not only the research results that are important, but rather the research processes required to obtain those results. The journey along a research pathway should be fraught with challenges, for only through these desirable difficulties and the generative learning processes associated with overcoming these hurdles can deep learning take place, and research skills be developed. This talk frames GenAI in a particular light, so that research supervisors can more easily explain to their students which research tasks can be transparently outsourced to GenAI, and which should remain a challenge for the researcher and their supervision team.