Generative AI in Collaborative Academic Report Writing: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Ethical Considerations

The availability and abundance of GenAI tools to administer tasks traditionally managed by people have raised concerns, particularly within the education and academic sectors, as some students may highly rely on these tools to complete the assignments designed to enable learning. This article focuses on informing students about the significance of investing their time during their studies on developing essential life-long learning skills using their own critical thinking, rather than depending on AI models that are susceptible to misinformation, hallucination, and bias. As we transition to an AI-centric era, it is important to educate students on how these models work, their pitfalls, and the ethical concerns associated with feeding data to such tools. Keywords: GenAI in Academic Writing GenAI's Ethics GenAI's Privacy Concerns. 1 Introduction Writing academic reports, and papers have been instrumental to assisting students and researchers in shaping their ideas, organising their methods, and practicing their communication skills, particularly when this process is combined with receiving constant feedback from experts. With the launch of OpenAI's first publicly available Large Language Model, namely ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), a significant concern rose within the academic and research community about the reliability of the academic and research output. Evidence suggests that as individuals began discovering the availability and efficiency in using Generative Artificial Intelligence tools in late 2022, there was a significant surge in retracted research articles resulting in more than 10,000 retracted papers [1]. The over-reliance of individuals on various Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) tools for completing tasks that require a human's critical thinking has raised concerns.