AI-Conscious Grant Design & Project Planning in SocSci and Humanities

AI is already reshaping research practice. Those without prior backgrounds in computer science or related fields are struggling to keep pace with the rate of change. While testing out AI integrations in current research projects offers some scope for experimentation, a lack of skills, knowledge, and appropriate ethics procedures makes post-hoc integration difficult. This challenge is particularly acute because many of these projects were designed several years ago, before AI-related considerations were anticipated.

Rather than retrofitting AI into older designs, many of us are individually trying to develop projects that take AI into account from the outset, but are doing so in relative isolation, without structured support or opportunities to test ideas collaboratively.

In light of this, the AI Competency Centre and Dominik Lukeš are helping to understand what the needs were in this space and gauge interest in forming a small, collaborative group focused on developing AI-conscious approaches to grant writing and project design, whether such a group would be useful, and in what form.

To explore this idea further, we wanted to convene a short meeting of research-active colleagues who are:

• planning a grant submission, and/or
• designing a project that may incorporate AI methods or tools

Depending on needs raised at the Teams meeting, possible routes for such a group in the future could be to:

• share emerging funder guidance and institutional norms,
• test tools and use-cases in a structured way,
• discuss ethical and methodological implications early in the design process, and
• learn from one another’s experimentation in a supportive setting.

Here, “AI” is used primarily to refer to large language models and related generative tools.