How to write and sound like you know stuff

Confession: I have never written an academic essay!

In fact, the last time I wrote an essay was in my GCSE's which is now over ten (yes TEN!) years ago. So there was a lot to learn in the ways of researching the topic, finding good reading, referencing correctly and even formatting and submitting it correctly.

Academic Integrity

One of the worst offences you can commit in academia is incorrectly referencing - even unintentionally. This course is no exception, with anywhere from penalising your mark, getting you a zero, to being thrown off the course. At first, this seems kind of silly, why is the reaction so strong to what essentially boils down to copying? Last week, we learned about this in-depth and discussed why academic integrity is so important. One of my peers remarked:

I understand academic integrity as an agreement among the members of a learning community to be fair, honest and respectful when creating, developing and sharing ideas. It is a commitment made by each member of the community in which one agrees to act ethically in the construction and transmission of skills and knowledge.

This really made me think about how trust is so important to further our knowledge in all industries and spaces. If I am working with a client and I lie about my knowledge (even with good intentions!), we will not be able to progress with our work in the way we want to. Most importantly this simply wastes time.

And so - spurred on by the motivation to do the right thing I started looking at how exactly to reference correctly...

Referencing Project

...oh boy is it complicated.

There are so many rules. Is it a book? Is it a journal? Is it in print? How many authors? Is the author also an editor? etc.

The average reference ends up looking something like this:

Grace, K., Salvatier, J., Dafoe, A., Zhang, B. and Evans, O. (2018). 'When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts'. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 62, pp.729–754. Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf.

And so, with the essay deadline looming I did what any other person would do: waste several hours trying to code something to automatically write these for me.

The code is written using R in R Studio and works by reading you a question, which you provide an answer for and depending on your answer other questions will get asked. Once you finish all your questions it will format your answer into a lovely full reference which you can add to the bottom of your essay.

To summarise, I did manage to create one and it does do it well. But it is slow, a bit clunky and I spent so long fixated on getting it right I suddenly had a lot less time to read and research my essay.

What I find works better is to find an existing citation and convert it into the format our university requires, save everything to my bibliography list and then double-check a few of them using my tool. This became really apparent as I was researching, as I didn't really have the time to sit and ensure I had a perfect reference when I may not even be using any of the text I was "skimming".
I keep a list of all texts I read in my Notion, so I can find them more quickly if I remember I want to use a part of them and to keep track of what I have already read. It's very useful!

And so goes onto the essay...

Artificial Intelligence and Legal Proceedings

This was the chosen topic for the essay.

In 1,000 words, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using AI techniques/algorithms in legal proceedings, bring some examples into the discussion, and evaluate its ethical aspects.

If you don't know what Artificial Intelligence is, you might initially think of a robot pondering in some blue room (see image below) which is a favoured sort of image portrayed by the media. However, the current reality of AI is computers doing very specific tasks. It's a broad topic but essentially refers to the method of writing some sort of algorithm or mathematical equation to "train" a computer to do something to replace a human doing it. An easy example that everyone will have heard of is image recognition, where you train an AI to recognise if it's seeing a picture of a car or a tree. Technology like this would be vital for something like self-driving cars. Another example would be facial recognition on your phone. It is really remarkable and has, and will continue to revolutionise many industries. This is not to say that one day we couldn't have intelligent robots, just look at Sophia, but the vast majority of how it is being used at the moment are more like the examples given. I recommend if you'd like to know more about the future of AI, and where it is heading, take a read of this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf (This is the same one I gave as a reference example earlier).

Now in the context of legal proceedings, there are a few different applications we can apply AI. Boring but important stuff like managing paperwork, and more interesting stuff like determining which side would win in a court case. And most controversially of all, what if we could replace a Judge in court entirely with a sort of "Justice Machine" that sentenced real people? This wouldn't even look like a robot judge, just a computer that would be fed evidence and would spit out the sentencing. Can we remove humans from the justice system?

Something that is really important to remember when you read anything about AI or Machine Learning is that Artificial Intelligence has many flaws. If we feed it the wrong information, it will get things wrong. It is also very literal and does not have the same common sense that a human would have. And finally, if we feed it biased information, it will be biased. There is a really excellent section of this video here that talks about a 'hypothetical' AI model that can predict where crimes will occur, and how existing human biases can be built into artificial machines.

Generally, this is actually a really interesting topic that will one day impact our lives, and I'll provide my final essay here for you to read if you'd like. It goes into a little more depth and example than my blog does.

Finally, another great resource on the topic I found was this article which goes into more detail about AI and replacing judges.

On this topic, I'd like to leave you with some questions to think about:

• How do you think AI could benefit you?
• How would you feel if you were accused of a crime and your punishment was determined by a "Justice Machine"?
• What problems do you think could arise from humans no longer being a part of the justice system?
• Would you trust a "Justice Machine"? If no, what would you want to know about the "Justice Machine" before you could trust it?
• If a "Justice Machine" gave the wrong sentencing - who is to blame?

The use of AI in legal is still in its infancy but there are attempts and trials for more minor things, so the progression to major technology could be possible. However, for now, I believe it is still quite a way off from getting right so you don't need to worry about robots suddenly taking over our entire justice system.

What I will highlight is that these questions above are important because one day, some could be questions that need to be answered in order to create laws and regulations around AI so the systems can be used in these settings. As a human race, we still need to determine the ethics around how machines are managed and regulated. And so, it is really important to be informed and to start thinking about what your stance would be.

Conclusions on writing my first Academic Essay

Once I had gotten the referencing down I did slowly start to find my way with it. I tried to embody an expert voice and use my knowledge of AI from my professional experience to formulate my opinion. Researching can be difficult, particularly when you already know something but can't remember where from and need to find a source that will support your point. But overall it was quite fun and I was quite proud of what I handed in.

By the time you read this, I will know my mark already, but I will save it for now!

Thanks for taking the time to read and if you have any questions about anything I discussed feel free to get in touch.