What happens when AI use among university students doubles in a single year and institutions are still catching up?

To mark the launch of Coursera's 2026 AI on Campus Report, Marni Baker Stein, Chief Content Officer, and Jack Moran, Global Enterprise PR Manager, join me to discuss the findings. With nearly half of UK students now using AI to complete their study tasks and 80% reporting improved grades, the data raises urgent questions about what we are actually measuring when we talk about academic success in an AI-augmented world.

This conversation explores whether better grades signal deeper learning or simply more polished outputs, why the race to detect AI-generated work is one institutions are already losing, and what it would mean to genuinely redesign assessment for an AI-enabled generation. Marni and Jack also make a compelling case that AI, if intentionally designed, has the potential to strengthen belonging and reduce equity gaps rather than widen them, pointing to evidence from Coursera's own platform that underserved learners are among the most active users of AI tutoring tools.

We discuss the tension between student enthusiasm and educator anxiety, why fewer than a third of UK universities have a formal AI policy despite the scale of adoption, and what it means for institutions to move from reactive policies to proactive frameworks that put faculty confidence and student equity at the centre.

AI Ethics Now

Exploring the ethical dilemmas of AI in Higher Education and beyond.

A University of Warwick IATL Podcast

This podcast series was developed by Dr Tom Ritchie and Dr Jennie Mills, the module leads of the ⁠ at the University of Warwick. The AI Revolution module explores the history, current state, and potential futures of artificial intelligence, examining its profound impact on society, individuals, and the very definition of 'humanness.'

This podcast was initially designed to provide a deeper dive into the key themes explored each week in class. We want to share the discussions we have had to help offer a broader, interdisciplinary perspective on the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence to a wider audience.

Join each fortnight for new critical conversations on AI Ethics with local, national, and international experts.

We will discuss:

• Ethical Dimensions of AI: Fairness, bias, transparency, and accountability.
• Societal Implications: How AI is transforming industries, economies, and our understanding of humanity.
• The Future of AI: Potential benefits, risks, and shaping a future where AI serves humanity.

If you want to join the podcast as a guest, contact Tom.Ritchie@warwick.ac.uk.

When AI agents can navigate systems autonomously, where do you draw the line between efficiency and control?

Ed Crook, VP Strategy & Operations at DeepL, reveals how the company shifted from specialised translation to launching autonomous AI agents, and why human-in-the-loop oversight remains non-negotiable even as agentic AI scales across heavily regulated industries.

This conversation explores how DeepL agents work through a secondary browser interface where users can view real-time navigation, pause, raise their hand, and take or relinquish control at any time. Ed explains why the agent asks when unsure, building trust the same way you'd work with a new colleague, rather than locking themselves in a dark room until 5pm. We discuss where users still actively request control (login access, sensitive systems), what 20,000 completed tasks during beta testing revealed about when AI needs intervention, and why agents can flawlessly complete advanced tasks yet fail at very basic ones.

Ed shares how DeepL works with financial services, pharmaceuticals, and legal professionals navigating compliance requirements whilst exploring agentic AI. Over half of legal professionals report AI lets them spend more time on high-judgment strategic tasks, and two-thirds are already exploring agentic systems. He explains why shadow AI shouldn't be vilified but understood as employees seeking productivity.

We discuss how the EU AI Act encourages proportionate responses where high-risk applications carry high responsibility, why having European-built AI success stories matters, and how centrally managed AI tools create governance oversight whilst enabling peer learning across teams. Ed reveals the education gap: access to AI tools has grown faster than training on responsible use, and why upskilling, both technical and conceptual, is the burning priority for companies navigating AI adoption.

The challenge: build agents that combine autonomy with human judgment, scale AI adoption with responsible governance, and future-proof teams through peer learning rather than just technical training.

AI Ethics Now

Exploring the ethical dilemmas of AI in Higher Education and beyond.

A University of Warwick IATL Podcast

This podcast series was developed by Dr Tom Ritchie and Dr Jennie Mills, the module leads of the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠IATL module ⁠"The AI Revolution: Ethics, Technology, and Society"⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ at the University of Warwick. The AI Revolution module explores the history, current state, and potential futures of artificial intelligence, examining its profound impact on society, individuals, and the very definition of 'humanness.'

This podcast was initially designed to provide a deeper dive into the key themes explored each week in class. We want to share the discussions we have had to help offer a broader, interdisciplinary perspective on the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence to a wider audience.

Join each fortnight for new critical conversations on AI Ethics with local, national, and international experts.

We will discuss:

• Ethical Dimensions of AI: Fairness, bias, transparency, and accountability.
• Societal Implications: How AI is transforming industries, economies, and our understanding of humanity.
• The Future of AI: Potential benefits, risks, and shaping a future where AI serves humanity.

If you want to join the podcast as a guest, contact Tom.Ritchie@warwick.ac.uk.

How do we prevent AI from amplifying destructive environmental narratives at a massive scale - potentially 100 billion words per day?

Mariana Roccia and Jorge Vallego, from the H4rmony Project, reveal how ecolinguistics and ecosophies can reshape how large language models engage with ecological issues whilst addressing cultural and linguistic bias in AI-generated environmental discourse.

This conversation explores how mainstream LLMs celebrate Coca-Cola as a "cultural icon" or patio heaters as "brilliant" without acknowledging environmental costs unless explicitly challenged. The team shares how they developed Theophrastus, an open-source assistant built on ChatGPT, instructed with an ecosophy: a living framework of ecological values that guides language generation toward planetary well-being rather than profit.

We discuss how word embeddings cluster dominant narratives together in multidimensional space, why fine-tuning and reinforcement learning can shift those embeddings toward ecologically aligned responses, and how system prompts embed ecosophy into every AI interaction. The team explains their approach using preference datasets rather than imposed answers, working with the International Ecolinguistics Association's 1,500+ researchers to ensure cultural and linguistic representation.

Mariana discusses why language representation matters, explaining how AI models are predominantly trained in English, which risks amplifying cultural imbalances and losing local ecological knowledge that's vital for different cultures. Jorge explains why transparency around environmental ethics in AI matters as much as addressing carbon footprint, and why major AI players need to adopt ecosophies just as they address gender and racial bias.

This episode continues our new short series featuring conversations from the ⁠⁠⁠Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction⁠⁠⁠ held at the University of Warwick on 21 November 2025. The symposium was organised by ⁠⁠⁠Dr Yanyan Li⁠⁠⁠, Xianzhi Chen, and Kaiqi Yu, and jointly funded by the Institute of Advanced Study Conversations Scheme and the Doctoral College Networking Fund, with sponsorship from Warwick Students' Union.

AI Ethics Now

Exploring the ethical dilemmas of AI in Higher Education and beyond.

A University of Warwick IATL Podcast

This podcast series was developed by Dr Tom Ritchie and Dr Jennie Mills, the module leads of the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠IATL module ⁠"The AI Revolution: Ethics, Technology, and Society"⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ at the University of Warwick. The AI Revolution module explores the history, current state, and potential futures of artificial intelligence, examining its profound impact on society, individuals, and the very definition of 'humanness.'

This podcast was initially designed to provide a deeper dive into the key themes explored each week in class. We want to share the discussions we have had to help offer a broader, interdisciplinary perspective on the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence to a wider audience.

Join each fortnight for new critical conversations on AI Ethics with local, national, and international experts.

We will discuss:

• Ethical Dimensions of AI: Fairness, bias, transparency, and accountability.
• Societal Implications: How AI is transforming industries, economies, and our understanding of humanity.
• The Future of AI: Potential benefits, risks, and shaping a future where AI serves humanity.

If you want to join the podcast as a guest, contact Tom.Ritchie@warwick.ac.uk.