Artificial Intelligence in Academia: a De Gruyter Brill retrospective

Pre-Covid, Artificial Intelligence was already being discussed at academic librarians’ conferences in Asia, but 2023 was the year in which it surfaced as a major issue for academia in the West. Since December 2023, De Gruyter Brill has been both contributing to the debate and tracking its progress by dedicating at least one of its quarterly webinars for librarians to AI.

Artificial Intelligence: the Great Divider was the first in the series. Delivered towards the end of 2023 by Dr Andres Guadamuz, a Reader in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex, Dave Puplett, University Librarian at the University of Greenwich and Svein Arne Brygfjeld, who has spent much of his career working at the National Library of Norway, the webinar was a blue skies exploration of the potential of AI in creating images, assisting students and researchers and making a contribution to communities outside of academia.

The debate about how and how much students and academics should be allowed to rely on AI was already under way and the University of Greenwich had come to this conclusion: ‘The university believes that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a very useful tool to aid learning, and its effective, responsible use is likely to be a desired trait for employers. However, its use must be guided by principles of academic integrity and with awareness of the risks it poses, when not used with care.’

Essentially, this position is still held by universities around the world. However, the definition of “responsible use” has constantly shifted over the intervening years.

Taming the Dragon was the title of the next AI webinar, presented at the end of 2024. This proved to be the most popular webinar in the series and featured four speakers.

Mark Hughes, the Head of Library Services at Cardiff Metropolitan University, said that AI – as well as now being the perpetual elephant in the room at academic gatherings – is a “knowledge issue”, not a technological issue; and consequently it is for librarians, as custodians of knowledge, to engage with it. Jessica Morales, the Associate Dean for Collections and Open Initiatives at the University of Arkansas, said that the use of AI is transitioning from organic adoption to a more strategic approach. This means that it can be integrated with the strategic emphases of the university: career readiness and research excellence. Dr Andrea Alessandro Gasparini, Chief Engineer at the University of Oslo Library, Norway, and Heli Kautonen, Chief Librarian at the University of Turku, Finland, described an application called the “B-Wheel” which they had developed to help academic librarians use AI.

Each of these speakers discussed targeted and constructive ways of using AI: the debate had moved on from the exciting but amorphous blue skies conjectures to practicalities.

The third webinar, entitled Artificial Intelligence in Academia: the lowdown, picked up the pragmatic theme and developed it. The speakers were Dr Andrew Cox, Senior Lecturer in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication at the University of Sheffield and Dr Iman Magdy Khamis, the Library Director at Northwestern University in Qatar.

Dr Cox identified three dilemmas that AI poses when applied to academic tasks: the sycophancy problem; the replicability problem; and the information quality problem. He said that identifying and, insofar as possible, addressing these problems is crucial, since surveys conducted in 2025 showed that 47% of students had used AI in some way for assessments. Dr Iman Khamis demonstrated the ways in which Artificial Intelligence can help librarians by assisting in the execution of many repetitive or automated library tasks.

The fourth De Gruyter Brill webinar on AI was its most ambitious yet. Entitled Artificial Intelligence in Academia: A Global Phenomenon with Regional Variations, it was delivered by speakers based in three separate continents: Dr Xin Bi, the Chief Officer of Data and Director of the Centre for Knowledge and Information at X’ian Jiaotong-Liverpool University [XJTLU], China; Alexander Berg-Weiss, who leads the software development department at the University Library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Munich, Germany; and Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, USA.

Dr Bi was enthusiastic about the many opportunities that AI offers – e.g., to enhance the learning experience of students by providing personalised support – but he also described potential pitfalls. His mantra was “AI is for enhancing but not for replacing.” Aside from the ethical challenges that AI presents, he said it could also damage students’ ability to think and write for themselves. Alexander Berg-Weiss explored an unintended negative consequence of Artificial Intelligence: how it undermines one of the most hard-won tenets of scholarly publishing, the principle of Open Access. Michael Levine-Clark described the checks and balances introduced to ensure ethical use of AI at his university. He also mentioned the detrimental effect AI has on the environment – and probably also on authors’ rights.  Xin Bi emphasised the many positives that AI brings to academia;  Alexander Berg-Weiss showed that it may produce results that haven’t been foreseen; and Michael Levine-Clark was the most cautious of the speakers. Each offered a different perspective.

A key hypothesis of this most recent webinar was that AI is viewed differently by users in different geographical regions; and the premise was upheld by how these speakers said they and their colleagues approached it. It is a concept that Dominique de Roo, Chief Strategy Officer at De Gruyter Brill, wishes to highlight in her role as a panel session leader at the upcoming APE Conference, which will be held in Berlin in January 2026. Partly to support the conference and partly to explore ways in which it might itself effectively develop Artificial Intelligence applications to benefit its patrons, in autumn 2025 De Gruyter Brill commissioned Gold Leaf to carry out a global study of how AI is currently being used by universities and academic libraries.

Dominique will reveal some of the findings from this study at the APE Conference; and De Gruyter Brill will publish the headline results after the conference has taken place. Please watch this space for further details!

From everyone at De Gruyter Brill, heartfelt thanks to all those of you who have attended and contributed to one or more of the webinars or read the blog this year. We look forward to meeting you again next year. In the meantime we wish you a happy, healthy and relaxing end of year break, and an exciting and fulfilling 2026.

[Title Image by akinbostanci/E+/Getty Images]