Personality Traits and AI - Academic Integrity

In between half term outings with my little one, mid-afternoon naps and some attempt to improve my fitness, I have more time to reflect.. and read LinkedIn... 

AI Writers and Guilty-Until-Proved-Innocent

Today's article written by an individual lamenting on a new modern problem; the AI writer and how students are plying their academic literature into AI checkers to see if they can make sure their genuine work is not picked up written by AI. Essentially, maybe we're pointing to new risks in academic environments where students need to care about being guilty until proven innocent...great article.

This made me think. Students, me included, pour hours upon hours into academic literature reviews, analysing every detail and importantly, picking up the technical skills of how to write in a very specific way. Personally too, with my tutor's emailed words ringing around and around and around in my head.. 'not specific enough', 'needs to be more concise'... for someone who's achieving actually quite good grades, the pressure feels constantly on. 

So I have to admit, out of curiosity, I also put my own work into an AI detector to see how my genuine work would be assessed after I also tried it out with a paragraph (which I later deleted) of AI content... an it didn't do a bad job! My written work wasn't detected but the AI content was, it was enough to frighten me into never even becoming tempted to use AI ever again. 

Reflections about Personality

But then again, according to my 16Personalities assessment, I am ENFP.. interesting specifically about high in 'Feeling' which may explain my Conscientiousness (according to traditional Big-5 Personality Index OCEAN).

Here's what 16Personalities said...  

People with the ENFP personality type (Campaigners) are true free spirits – outgoing, openhearted, and open-minded. With their lively, upbeat approach to life, ENFPs stand out in any crowd. But even though they can be the life of the party, they don’t just care about having a good time. These personalities have profound depths that are fueled by their intense desire for meaningful, emotional connections with others.

ENFP personalities carry an interesting blend of carefree sociability, sparkling imagination, and deep, contemplative introspection.

But that... 

ENFPs need to be careful, however. Their intuition may lead them to read far too much into other people’s actions and behaviors. Instead of simply asking for an explanation, they may end up puzzling over someone else’s desires or intentions. This kind of social stress is what keeps harmony-focused ENFP personalities awake at night. 

Now a lot of people might call 'Bull' on this, indeed I also did. It's not a proven technique of assessing personality, and contextually, a year after I took this for my MSc module, I would hopefully assess some of the other things it said about my personality as being completely inaccurate but here's what worries me about AI.

Personality and AI

Imagine GenAI is now more sophisticated (see this week's news regarding OpenAI's '5.0', it's potentially on the way) and is the quiet assessor of personality, no checks and balances, no chance for teachers to step in and raise flags. Does that concern you?

It does for me and made me think about the fluid aspect of personality (16Personality aside - yesterdays ENFP will probably change today) and a student's propensity for conducting academic dishonesty and I think we have a really challenging way forward for student motivation. 

This LinkedIn article reviews students' love for writing, I have complete empathy for this, it's why I'm writing at the moment. But what I think is the danger here, that psychologically, students are entering a very different era. We're potentially telling them not to write too well or now even use words, 'just in case', their hard-earned hours spent on genuine academic authorship is incorrectly detected as being academically, dishonestly, written. But worse, students should now be more neurotic in their use of words, to somehow prevent 'talking' like AI. However this is a great move by teachers. I advocate AI literacy for students to determine their work should be authentic, avoid using words such as 'emphasise' - damn you AI, I love that word. EMPHASISED. 

So now Neuroticism increases among some students... but does that mean their personality types are changing because of AI? 

If students are now using AI to more intricately pour over literature which they can query, reframe and redevelop... students' language recall is being subtly adopted using AI language. Just look how accents over time have mellowed with globalisation, this constant exposure to AI language, perhaps proves a really difficult challenge for linguists and 'natural' language teachers. 

Well back to my academic study and thinking really deeply about how AI is potentially already shaping our personalities. 

Please note these reflections are not written in the usual academic way because I don't want to self-plagiarise! I am not therefore going to write up this research (yet)... 😁

References

Here's some peer-reviewed literature (I don't want to be thought of as not providing accurate research).

Hensel, R., & Visser, R. (2019). Does personality influence effectual behaviour? International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26(3), 467–484. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijebr-06-2019-0343

Shaukat, R., Ahmad, S., Naveed, M. A., & Ur Rehman, S. (2023). Impact of Personality Traits on Knowledge Sharing Behavior of Academicians: A Case of University of Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan. Sage Open, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231160984 

Stein, J. P., Messingschlager, T., Gnambs, T., Hutmacher, F., & Appel, M. (2024). Attitudes towards AI: measurement and associations with personality. Scientific reports, 14(1), 2909. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53335-2 
 
Tlili, A., Sun, T., Mouna Denden, None Kinshuk, Graf, S., Fei, C., & Wang, H. (2023). Impact of personality traits on learners’ navigational behavior patterns in an online course: a lag sequential analysis approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1071985 

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