A brownbag for UW-Madison researchers
Dr. Luke Plonsky
Professor, Applied Linguistics
Northern Arizona University
Thursday, November 6, 11:30-12:30 pm
1418 Van Hise Hall
Please note: That same day, November 6, Dr. Plonsky will also give a lecture at 3pm in 1418 Van Hise Hall on What Do You Mean by ‘Questionable’? The Ethics of Study Quality in Applied Linguistics. RSVP to attend. All are welcome!
About the brownbag
Generative AI is an ethical minefield for academics. We might not question a researcher who asks ChatGPT, for example, to summarize an article or to help them generate an outline. But what about asking AI to analyze our data (Aryadoust, 2024) or to distill our manuscript into a submission-ready abstract (Botes et al., forthcoming)? Similarly, journal reviewers might turn to AI-based tools for help with the high effort, low reward task facing them. (I have personally seen this multiple times.) Recognizing that (a) AI is here to stay and that (b) we want to avoid a future where studies are written, reviewed, and decided upon almost entirely by bots, we need to figure this out. To date, however, very limited guidance is available from learned societies, journals, or publishers on whether, when, and how it might be acceptable to employ GenAI in our scholarly work. Spoiler alert: I don’t have the answers. What I will provide in this session, though, is a set of considerations and proposals within the frameworks of study quality (Plonsky, 2024) and ‘questionable research practices’ (QRPs) (Larsson et al., 2024) to help guide our decision-making as authors as well as in other roles we carry out including, namely, co-authors/collaborators, mentors, journal editors, and reviewers. I will also introduce (and solicit feedback on) a nascent-stage study my collaborators and I are carrying out to catalog the breadth of AI-specific QRPs (Yaw et al., in preparation).
About the speaker
Luke Plonsky (PhD, Michigan State) is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. His scholarly work, addressing substantive and methodological topics ranging from the effects of language learning apps and individual differences to sampling, ethics, open science, measurement, and meta-analytic methods, has appeared in over 100 articles, book chapters, and books. Luke serves as Editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Managing Editor of Foreign Language Annals, and Founding Editor of Applied Linguistics Press. In addition to an Honorary Professorship at University of St. Andrews (Scotland), Luke has held faculty appointments at Georgetown University and University College London, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain in 2021.
Sponsors: The Language Institute
Contact: Dianna Murphy
The UW-Madison Language Institute is committed to inclusive and accessible programming. To request an accommodation for this event, please contact Language Institute associate director Jana Martin three business days in advance.