This PhD project investigates the impact of generative AI (GenAI) on academic editing, addressing two key gaps: (1) the linguistic differences between professional and AI-generated edits in scholarly publications, and (2) how academic writers—from PhD students to senior researchers—engage with, evaluate, and learn from AI-assisted language editing. Using a combination of corpus analysis, interviews, and real-time editing tasks, this research will provide insights into the opportunities and challenges of using GenAI for academic editing. The candidate will contribute to corpus annotation, data collection, and analysis, while exploring the implications of GenAI for scholarly communication. They will also contribute to the development of a university-wide survey examining researchers’ use of and perceptions toward GenAI for academic writing and language editing.
The doctoral researcher will be part of an interdisciplinary consortium, including two other PhD students, a post-doctoral researcher and five academic supervisors, investigating the impact of GenAI on language, communication, and critical literacy across educational and professional contexts. The broader project aims to address two critical gaps in current research: first, the need to understand how GenAI-produced language may reshape human writing, language learning, and communicative practices; and second, the importance of fostering critical competencies to help users engage thoughtfully with AI-generated content.
The initiative brings together expertise from linguistics, second language acquisition, natural language processing, translation studies, and communication sciences to analyze how AI-generated language influences human language use and first and foreign language learning. By addressing both the linguistic and educational dimensions of generative AI, the project seeks to promote critical AI literacy, mitigate the risks associated with uncritical reliance on GenAI tools, and foster a more informed, ethical, and reflective integration of these technologies into academic and public life.
The successful candidate will also be integrated into the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL).
