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AI for Academic Writing: Insights from Airlangga University Guest Lecture

From Republika · () Indonesian

Translated from Indonesian, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

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  • Airlangga Global Engagement hosted an international guest lecture on AI for academic writing, featuring a speaker from the University of Melbourne.
  • The lecture highlighted how specific keywords in AI prompts significantly influence the quality of revisions, with detailed prompts yielding better results.
  • While AI excels at grammar and spelling, it struggles to assess the quality of academic arguments, underscoring its role as a supplementary tool for human evaluators.

Airlangga Global Engagement (AGE) recently organized the ASCEND 2026 international guest lecture, focusing on "AI for Academic Excellence." The event, held via Zoom on July 27, 2026, brought together experts to discuss enhancing scholarly writing and publication readiness.

The selection of keywords in prompts greatly determines the type and level of feedback provided by AI.

— Haeun Kim, PhDDuring the ASCEND 2026 guest lecture, explaining the impact of prompt specificity on AI-generated revisions.

Haeun Kim, PhD, a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at The University of Melbourne, shared research on AI's effectiveness in academic writing. She noted that users often employ vague prompts like "correct this," while more detailed instructions yield significantly better feedback. Kim's research, using GPT-4 API on argumentative essays, demonstrated that prompts such as "revise this" or "rewrite this" led to more substantial text changes compared to simpler commands like "proofread this" or "check grammar." This finding emphasizes the critical role of precise language in AI prompting.

Further research presented by Kim compared AI's assessment of academic essays to human evaluation. While AI showed moderate agreement with human scores and proved reliable in detecting grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and vocabulary issues, it fell short in evaluating argument quality, content depth, organizational structure, and overall coherence. Kim stressed that AI should serve as a complementary tool, not a replacement for human judgment, especially in high-stakes academic assessments.

AI is quite reliable in detecting grammar, spelling, and vocabulary errors, but less effective in assessing argument quality, content depth, writing organization, and overall coherence.

— Haeun Kim, PhDDiscussing the limitations of AI in academic writing evaluation compared to human judgment.

The lecture also touched upon the advancements in multimodal AI, capable of processing and generating text, images, audio, and video simultaneously. Kim suggested that these developments open new avenues for language learning, offering innovative ways to engage with educational content.

AI should be positioned as a supplementary tool, not a replacement for human evaluators, especially in academic assessments with significant impact.

— Haeun Kim, PhDEmphasizing the role of AI in academic settings during the guest lecture.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Republika in Indonesian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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