By Rose Bialk
Generative AI. Are you scared yet? At our fine institution, there has been no shortage of hand-wringing over the idea that students who have priorities elsewhere in their academic careers will utilize such tools to avoid doing their work. In my capacity as a tutor at the Writing Center and the Chair of the Honor Board, I have been privy to a fair few of these conversations, and the question is always the same — how do we combat the seemingly inevitable onslaught of AI-generated work?
These conversations have several throughlines, most notably the idea that as generative AI has become more difficult to spot, it has become a greater threat to academic quality and integrity. Most professors’ concerns are centered on how we might prevent the use of such technology and are predicated on the premise that it is impossible to distinguish it from students’ original work.
I take great issue with this assertion. I can only speak from an anecdotal perspective, but in my experience, generative AI is unsubtle and especially easy to spot when it is used in creative contexts. AI art is a great example — its specific hallmarks include an inability to render hands and oddly placed objects in space.
In writing, sometimes suspicion of AI use starts as a gut feeling, but it is relatively easy to prove. Repetitive sentence structure and style, with similar lengths of sentences and inaccurate information are all telltale signs of AI usage. It is also worth noting that any work done by AI will differ greatly from work produced by a student in a situation where they could not have used AI, such as an in-class assignment or exam.
It can be much harder to suss out AI in the context of non-creative work, or work that relies more on fact regurgitation than creative thinking, we can call it “rote work,” in contrast to “creative work,” or work that requires original thought and effort. For instance, it may be more difficult to pick out when AI has solved a set of math problems or summarized an article.
However, I argue that if professors want work from their students and not a computer, they should not be assigning tasks that a computer is capable of doing. If professors want to teach students how to do rote work, that is their prerogative, but it is useless to spend time complaining that modern academics will employ modern methods.
If it is possible to complete an assignment convincingly by using AI, it cannot come as a shock to professors when students do just that. The issue with academia and AI is not that there is work a computer can complete, it is that this rote work is frequently assigned to students in ways that equate it to the same level of academic importance as creative work. No one gets mad when a calculator solves a math problem that a student could have done by hand, so we should find it within ourselves to accept AI doing the same thing. We may ask a computer to compute for us, but we are here to think for ourselves.
Professors who care about creative work have a responsibility to actually demand it of their students. If AI can summarize the bare bones of an article, why are you asking an undergrad to do it for you instead? It is a vestigial skill — not harmful, but not necessary. If a student values that skill, they should pursue it, but students are far from uniform in what they hope to get out of their educations.
I would argue a far more universal priority should be finding the work computers cannot do for us and developing those skills. Creative thinking, communication skills and unique perspectives set each of us further apart than any expertise in organizing a spreadsheet ever could. If our academic community is so concerned about originality, we have the power to self-select the skills we want to emphasize and do away with universally-resented rote work while we are at it.
But what of students who would look at creative work and seek a way to not complete it anyway? Since we have established that generative AI is an incredibly poor and easy-to-spot substitute for actual creativity, I argue that LC need not waste time worrying about whether or not we will spot it — I truly believe we will.
In such cases, generative AI is no different from other run-of-the-mill cheating like having a phone out during a test or buying an essay, and should be treated as such. If generative AI is used for creative work, that is plagiarism and should be treated as such. Credit for an assignment or even a class should not be granted in the face of evidence that AI has been used.
It is the responsibility of professors, as well as institutions on campus such as the Honor Board, to enforce real consequences for academic dishonesty. We are all adults at this school, even if some of us are early on in that particular journey, and adults are empowered to cheat. It is a waste of resources to try to further prevent such an easily addressed issue if the action is effectively discouraged with creative, complex, thought-provoking assignments, which we should be getting in the first place.
College education is a privilege, something that is easy to forget in a culture that heavily incentivizes a college degree. To forget that, and waste the time of everyone else involved in reading, grading or in any way thinking about a plagiarized assignment is unconscionable. Beyond that, plagiarism is a waste of time for the student themselves and a dilution of the spirit of their participation in higher education. If a student chooses to be academically dishonest, they need to be prepared to suffer real consequences.
Nobody said undergraduate studies were easy, and everyone deserves as much of a helping hand as they can get. However, using generative AI to circumvent a process that is meant to be a learning opportunity is a waste in the purest sense. It is incumbent upon our institution to set a standard of behavior for us to strive toward, and anything less than a good-faith effort devalues the education we are so privileged to receive. Should we forget that, it is not on our institution to save us from ourselves. Rather, it should hold us and our work to a higher standard, mete out consequences as needed and treat us as the adults and academics we are.
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