AnthroAI is a wide-ranging research and practice collaboration between the students and lecturers who make up the AI Working Group at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews. Premised on student-staff partnership, AnthroAI is producing research findings, learning tools and employability resources to empower social anthropology students to identify, grow and communicate their discipline-specific, AI-related skills inside and outside university.
AnthroAI is an urgent response to three key impacts of AI on higher education: the increasing use of LLMs by students and across society; teacher and student concerns with ethics, misconduct and deskilling; and the graduate employability crisis. We use experimentation and knowledge co-production between students and educators to transform these impacts into opportunities for learning and upskilling.
Although based at St Andrews, AnthroAI aims to share its resources freely, becoming a hub for best practice dissemination that will enhance learning for social anthropology students world-wide. AnthroAI also provides a successful case study for how arts and humanities disciplines can meaningfully and critically engage with AI in higher education, offering a replicable model for universities seeking to move beyond STEM-centric approaches to AI literacy.
AnthroAI responds directly to a sector-wide need: we demonstrate that it is possible to engage the AI challenge successfully via creative, curriculum-embedded, student-centred innovations.