IFT 3710/6759 - Policy about the use of AI agents and chatbots
This document describes the policy about the use of AI agents and chatbots in the development of the course work, in particular the project code, the final report and the presentation.
Lire la plitique sur l’utilisation des agents d’IA et des chatbots en français
Summary
In a nutshell, the most important aspects of the policy are the following:
- The use of LLM chatbots, AI agents and coding assistants is generally discouraged in this course, as it may be detrimental to the learning objectives.
- For the final report, it is specifically not allowed to generate text with LLM chatbots or AI agents. All the text must be written by you. Spell-checking tools are allowed.
- For coding, while the use of AI agents and assistants is discouraged, their use is not forbidden. However, you are expected to understand all the code used for the project.
- All uses of LLM chatbots, AI agents, and coding assistants must be disclosed and described in the final report, in a separate section titled “Disclosure of the use of AI-based tools”.
- The violation of this policy may imply failing the course.
Motivation
The objective of this course is to prepare you to work on practical machine learning projects. The content of the course includes software engineering tools, such as version control, coding best practices, data management, as well as the principles of scientific and technical writing and data visualisation. That means that you are expected to learn and practice skills such as coding, organising a coding project, plan the work, training machine learning models, critically analysis the results, drawing conclusions and writing a technical report, etc.
The widespread deployment of AI-assisted tools such as chatbots and assistants has resulted in their adoption by many people for many of the tasks you are expected to carry out in this course, such coding, writing and even brainstorming and ideation. However, in the best case scenario, it is highly uncertain whether using these tools would help you develop these skills. In the worst case scenario, it is certain that the abuse of these AI-based tools would be detrimental to the accomplishment of the learning objectives of this course. For example, if you ask a chatbot or agent to generate the code and final report of your machine learning project, you may obtain an OK-looking result, but you will likely not learn anything beyond interacting with a chatbot, which is not an objective of this course.
For these reasons, the use of AI agents, assistants and chatbots is generally discouraged for the development of the course work, and it is specifically not allowed for certain tasks such as writing the final report.
The ability to clearly write technical and scientific content to describe complex ideas and processes is a very important skill to develop. The tangible output of writing - a text - may be replicated by a language model, but the cognitive processes that take place while we write and the skills that are acquired while we learn to write cannot be replicated if we outsource the process to an automatic tool. In other words, learning how to write technical and scientific content teach us to think better. For these reasons, text generation is specifically not allowed and your expected to write all the content of the final report.
Besides the reasons mentioned above, it is also important to mention that the extensive use of AI-based tools presents environmental and ethical concerns. The proliferation of AI-based tools and their widespread deployment has triggered the construction and extension of large data centres around the world. These data centres require extensive use of raw materials and consume large amounts of water and electricity, which result in environmental impacts that pose serious concerns in the current context of climate crisis. Furthermore, both the development and use of large AI systems have been associated to multiple ethical concerns, including the discrimination of certain groups, increase of inequality due to the appropriation of resources and wealth accumulation, copyright infringement, and the spread of mis- and dis-information, among many other issues.