Ethical and Responsible use of GenAI
GenAI: Critical, Ethical and Pedagogical Perspectives’
Building on international (UNESCO), national (HEA) and institutional (TU Dublin) guidance on the use of GenAI in Teaching, Learning and Assessment, our conversations as a community of staff who teach at TU Dublin are continuing to mature. Alongside developing an understanding of what GenAI can do, we are increasingly exploring what its use might mean for teaching, learning and assessment, and asking questions about what it might contribute, when it might add value, where it may not be appropriate, and how it could support learning. This more critical and pedagogically informed conversation can help us make considered decisions within our different disciplinary and educational contexts. This developing conversation moves beyond technical literacy, understanding what GenAI is and how it operates, towards a more critical and evaluative perspective concerned with why, whether, and under what conditions these tools should be integrated into teaching, learning, and assessment practices.
TU Dublin will maintain its institutional commitment to developing a foundational understanding of AI and GenAI, while supporting academic staff to engage in the ongoing process of making informed decisions. These decisions are grounded in three interrelated principles:
- Engagement with emerging research
- reflective practice situated in context
- evolving disciplinary and institutional understandings of the affordances and implications of these technologies.
Recognising that AI and GenAI require an interdisciplinary approach in higher education, including legal, ethical, disciplinary, pedagogical, technological and environmental perspectives, we encourage consideration of the relevance of these different dimensions in context. Effective engagement requires complexity, interdisciplinarity, critical awareness, contextual sensitivity and discipline-specific application.
This guidance page aims to:
- Explore TU Dublin’s perspective on the use of GenAI and AI in teaching, learning and assessment.
- Consider the key implications of a human-centred, ethical and critical approach to GenAI and AI in educational practice.
- Evaluate how GenAI and AI can be used in pedagogically grounded ways, critically weighing their potential benefits, limitations and risks.
We believe in an approach that places humans at the centre of educational practice, understanding technology as an enabler rather than a determinant or substitute for human goals. Humans think, create, learn, experience, and reflect; they possess consciousness and agency that underpin meaning-making and educational purpose. Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Generative AI (GenAI), operates differently and does not replicate these human capacities.
While contemporary technological discourse frequently uses terms such as learning, thinking, and intelligence to describe AI systems, these terms are metaphorical rather than ontological. AI systems do not think as humans think, learn as humans learn, possess consciousness, or experience the world in the phenomenological sense. Recognising this distinction is fundamental to maintaining conceptual clarity and avoiding technocentric (Ross & Alsayegh, 2023) or transhumanist (Porter, 2023) assumptions in educational practice.
A human-centred perspective means that human intelligence, critical thinking, and creativity remain more relevant than ever and should be at the centre of any interaction with AI and GenAI technologies. Humans must oversee and evaluate AI outputs, while remaining accountable for how these technologies are used.
AI technologies can augment human capabilities, but they cannot replicate the relational, ethical, and experiential dimensions intrinsic to human and educational roles. For example, AI cannot substitute for the nuanced judgement of a medical professional, the empathetic engagement of a counsellor, or the relational depth of human friendships. Accordingly, AI and GenAI should be understood as assistive technologies that require sustained human oversight, critical engagement, and ethical governance to support their responsible integration into teaching, learning, and assessment.