Update to Newsroom | Article for Synergy

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Artificial Intelligence and the Atrophication of Intellect and Academic Integrity

An article for Synergy (Volume 23, Number 1, 2025), the journal of the School Library Association of Victoria (SLAV), by Darryl Toerien.

The article will become publicly available with the publication of Volume 23, Number 2, but is shared here (download as PDF) with the permission of the Editor, Dr Susan La Marca. Access previous issues of Synergy here.

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Snapshot

Darryl Toerien, a UK practitioner and author, follows up on his article from Synergy Volume 22, Issue 1, 2024 — “As We Begin, So Shall We Go”: FOSIL as Means to a ‘Transcendent and Honourable End” — with an exploration of Artificial Intelligence and its detrimental impact on academic integrity, discussing ideas and concerns relevant to everyone in education.

[Ruth Participant]

Thank you for sharing this Darryl,

I have in turn shared it with out AI working party along with some slides from a very interesting IB presentation given over Easter in which they referred to the MAiLS (Machine Agents in Learning Scale) More information about this can be seen in this article by Carolus et al.(2023)(MAILS – Meta AI literacy scale: Development and testing of an AI literacy questionnaire based on well-founded competency models and psychological change- and meta-competencies)

It is indeed this question of cognitive offloading that has always been for me at the core of my thinking about AI and at the heart of where our thinking is going here – talking to students about the very core questions you address at the beginning of your article thinking about why they are at school and trying to combat the grades only result and focus on the deeper more rounded result of true education.

This is such a huge cultural shift, I’d be interested to hear the voice of employers in this conversation but I fear that they are results driven too and so the workplace perpetuates schools

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

A fascinating article Darryl, which links perfectly with the conversation we just had with Jenny on our latest podcast. My biggest fear is that it will be too tempting not to use it… as you say it is everywhere offering to ‘help’ and writing something yourself is hard and takes time. The scary thing is that we have grown up without AI and can see the problem; how are our students going to learn when it is in their faces all the time? They will not see this as something unusual, it will just be part of everyday life.  As if it is normal… and it is only going to get worse.

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