{"id":1048,"date":"2024-11-07T08:42:38","date_gmt":"2024-11-07T06:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/ti\/?page_id=1048"},"modified":"2025-04-25T09:21:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T06:21:05","slug":"what-about-writing-theses","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/ti\/en\/what-about-writing-theses\/","title":{"rendered":"4.3. What about writing theses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text-based AI model can be used to write theses, but a proper thesis cannot be completed solely by AI. In the age of AI, it is essential to support students throughout the entire writing process and raise awareness about the significance of its various stages.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Has the advent and spread of AI made you think that writing theses (i.e., bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses) and other extensive texts is pointless because a Text-based AI model could easily do the work for the student? In this chapter, we will debunk the fears and misconceptions associated with writing theses and discuss why theses are still crucial in the age of AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ability of text-based AI models to quickly produce seemingly coherent new texts has caused a lot of fear and debate about students potentially using these applications to write their theses, thus reducing the amount of independent work. This raises the question of whether writing theses loses its value if the text-based AI model can produce a sufficiently good job for the student. There seems to be a public perception that students no longer need to do anything except input a couple of lines of text into an AI application, after which the robot quickly generates the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With such a perception, it is easy to question the authorship of written assignments, especially since there is no practical way to determine whether a human or AI created the text (see also the University of Tartu\u2019s stance on detecting text-based AI model usage<\/a> (in Estonian)). The inability to detect this may lead to academic dishonesty if students submit AI-generated work as their own. On the other hand, constant doubts about authorship may create situations where students are unjustly accused of using AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it is helpful to remember that as long as independent critical thinking and argumentation skills are valued in academic higher education, the thesis remains relevant. Indeed, using text-based AI models can be beneficial during certain stages of writing a thesis (for more on this, see the section on thesis writing in the University of Tartu\u2019s guidelines<\/a>), but this does not mean that entire theses can be easily written using text-based AI models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some reasons why theses are still crucial in the age of AI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n