ICTA-UAB Debate - "AI in Academia: Friend or Foe?"

The second ICTA-UAB Debate is almost here! We hope you can all attend. We'd love to see you there. Come with questions… Leave with an open mind!

ICTA-UAB Debate: AI in Academia: Friend or Foe?

• Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2026
• Time: 11 am
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB

Large Language Models are taking academia by storm. How we write, research, teach, learn, and evaluate are changing fast. Plagiarized papers, machine-written grant applications, bot peer-reviewers are warning signs of something we can’t ignore: the slow erosion of the value of human academic work. Some welcome this development, or see it as inevitable. Others fear the loss of skills and ways of thinking that no machine can replace. We're here to debate it openly and critically, and to better inform our own opinions on the use of LLMs in academia. 

Joining the debate:

• Josep M. Duart - UOC-FuturEdJosep M. Duart, Professor of Educational Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, a university that has recently declared its ambition to imagine itself as a new “AI-native university”.

• Andrea Reyes Elizondo - CWTSAndrea Reyes Elizondo, researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, who since 2025 has been calling academic institutions to not adopt AI uncritically, co-authoring an open letter and position paper on the topic and giving lectures on the use of AI from a research integrity point of view, as well as on the importance of reclaiming reading and writing skills.

• Ariel Guersenzvaig - ELISAVAAriel Guersenzvaig, technology ethicist and Senior Lecturer at ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, who has published extensively on the hype and dangers of AI and argued against a perceived sense of inevitability.

The debate is organized by Giorgos Kallis and the REAL research group and will be moderated by Dallas O'Dell.