Challenges in the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Education for Sustainable Engineering

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence In University Education

The objective of this chapter is to provide university professors with ideas and options for the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in teaching, in order to incorporate concepts of sustainability, which are currently in high demand by companies. To achieve this, it is first necessary to establish the framework in which artificial intelligence is currently used in various sectors of society and its current status in universities, and then address the 2030 Agenda and the different tools available to achieve these objectives.

Focusing first on the current state of artificial intelligence, it is important to note that it is not a new term. This concept was introduced by John McCarthy in 1956, when he proposed the idea that machines could simulate various aspects of human behavior and intelligence (Weber, 2023). This concept has evolved greatly since then, breaking into the daily lives of citizens in the most advanced countries in recent years, facilitating many activities in both professional and personal spheres. It is present in leisure, gastronomy, transportation, communication, medicine, the military, among many other areas of activity (Gill & Kaur, 2023), in a very decisive and favorable way. In some of these activities, it has revolutionized the current landscape, as is the case with artificial intelligence applied to the diagnosis and analysis of medical images, initially analyzing a multitude of images, monitoring their evolution, and being able to establish a model that predicts, with a high success rate, the progression of patients from an initial image. From here, the possibilities are numerous.

Once successfully introduced in various economic sectors, it is necessary to incorporate it into university education to prepare students for their professional future with the highest possible guarantees of success, and to quickly adapt to the needs of an increasingly changing and technologically advanced job market. The knowledge of these tools by students can be an added value, or even decisive, during active job searching.

The reality is that, in universities, the incorporation of these tools is generally being carried out very slowly, at best. Although the enormous possibilities offered by artificial intelligence tools in classrooms are not in question, their use arouses some suspicion among academics, especially in the more technical areas of engineering, which is delaying their use in many university degrees (Lim et al., 2023; Yang & Chen, 2023). According to Al Darayseh (2023), in the teaching of science areas, the rejection by faculty is less. On one hand, the lack of university regulations on this topic means that teachers do not feel the necessary support from institutions when addressing their use in the classroom, creating a sense of abandonment in this aspect. To this must be added the difficulty that currently exists in detecting their use in the writing of assignments, without knowledge or explicit permission of the faculty (Eke, 2023; Gill et al., 2024), which obviously constitutes an unethical practice (Eke, 2023; Hung & Chen, 2023; Tlili et al., 2023; Yang, 2023). It is now common for teachers to compare students' work with different databases through specific anti-plagiarism programs, such as Turnitin, PlagScan, Viper, among others. However, the ability of artificial intelligence tools to draft a different text each time they are asked, even modifying the style of text, vocabulary, or verb tenses, makes it very difficult to detect if it is the student who has actually done it.

Therefore, training in these tools must be done thoughtfully and responsibly, coordinating their incorporation in the classroom with university policies, and promoting a critical and ethical attitude on the part of students during their use.