Social and Economic Policy

Generative AI can answer questions, write essays and summarise to a professional standard — allowing students to complete tasks while bypassing the effort through which understanding is built. Offloading their thinking to AI means students may lack the judgement, problem-solving capabilities and deep understanding required to create original solutions to real-world challenges.

The volume of scholarly literature is growing faster than any one researcher can keep up with, and making sense of it at scale is hard. Existing AI tools tend to do one narrow job well — retrieving papers or answering a question about a single document — but struggle to move fluidly from simple retrieval through to synthesising across many papers and generating new knowledge.