Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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57. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he has assessed the role that artificial intelligence should play in shaping the future of further and higher education; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [27049/24]

Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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Deputy Stanton is taking Question No. 57.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I am asking this question on behalf of Deputy Richard Bruton, who sends his apologies. He wants to ask the Minister if he has assessed the role artificial intelligence should play in shaping the future of further and higher education given that it has been described as the fourth industrial revolution, bringing a tsunami of change. I am interested in hearing the Minister's response.

Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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When the Deputy and I last discussed this topic, in May, we talked about how artificial intelligence holds transformative potential for workplaces in Ireland and what we are doing to ensure that workers of all types have the skills needed to meet challenges around displacement and opportunities to enhance their roles via artificial intelligence.

Al is also promising to transform how education is delivered by our tertiary system. It can help to make learning much more personalised to meet student needs. It can also adjust lessons and materials to individual’s learning styles and speeds, helping to ensure that students who need extra support receive it. AI platforms can analyse large amounts of data, giving insights into how students are performing and how effective institutions are.

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This can help improve courses, increase student retention and improve student performance. There are benefits but we also need to think about ethics, data privacy and the risk of bias in AI systems to ensure they are fair for everyone.

Safeguarding academic and research integrity is, of course, also a priority. Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI, has recently closed a public consultation on its White Paper on academic integrity assessing both the challenges and opportunities from the use of AI tools by students, learners and researchers. I highlighted the importance of being proactive in shaping Ireland’s response to artificial intelligence in my remarks at an event on skills in the digital age at the Institute of International and European Affairs last week. The refreshing and updating of the 2021 national AI strategy, AI - Here for Good, provides an opportunity to examine how best to enable the transformation of Ireland’s tertiary education system driven by AI adoption.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Minister for his response. Deputy Bruton has requested that I ask whether the Minister will comment on the potential for individualised learning paths that AI opens up and its impact on teaching and learning and the complications for assessment methods for distinguishing student knowledge from machine-generated content. It is a cause of huge concern in some third-level institutions that AI is generating the response and the work and there are questions about how to distinguish one from the other. Has the Department looked at this in any way with the third-level institutions to see what can be done on this issue?

Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Stanton. The answer is "Yes". In my first response, I stated this was one of the greatest risks to the integrity of the third-level sector - and to the second-level sector to a degree - when it comes to ensuring what is submitted by the learner or the student is the work of the learner or the student rather than the work of somebody else. That is going to be very challenging. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is looking after the overall Government approach to artificial intelligence but it has a particular and highly concentrated potential impact, both negative and positive. It could be very positive. We should not be over-cautious about saying there are many positives around it, but there are negatives. The negatives include a potential distortion of the third-level system and its results and qualifications. This is something we are attuned to and is why the Department is investing so much time in this, why we have the officials working on it that we do and why we are working with the Department of the Minister, Deputy Burke, on it as well.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Would the Minister agree this whole area is moving at an incredibly fast pace? Some of the very large companies are investing not millions but billions in the area and it has the potential to change everything as we know it. Will the Minister comment on the need to modernise the curriculum at third level to reflect the different skills people will need? Will he also address the serious ethical questions that arise as machines push beyond what human reasoning can manage and are applied in crucial areas such as genetics, medicine and so on? This is moving extremely fast. Are the State, the Minister's Department and the third-level institutions able to keep up?

Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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I should have said in my earlier response there are a number of courses that are already developed and in train through the higher and further education systems to see AI for a power of really positive good. It is the higher education institutions themselves, together with the Higher Education Authority, that develop the degree, postgraduate and masters courses. Through academic autonomy they have the right and the wherewithal to do that. If the Government was to be enunciating the type and content of courses we could be accused, rightly or wrongly, of interference in academic independence, which is something I would not want to stray into. However, all the academic institutions know the Government's view on this, which is that while AI is a power of absolute, positive good, there are risks and the biggest risk I see as the Minister with responsibility for this area is to the integrity of what a person is going to hang up on the wall after the fact. It is about whether, as Deputy Stanton said, it can be judged whether a machine has in some way interfered with the process and that we have got an unfair result. We have seen that with elections and we do not need to see it with academic output.