Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently caught dozens of students using artificial intelligence to generate identical apology emails after being accused of cheating by using AI to complete their class work.
The New York Times reports that professors Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, known as the Data Science Duo, recently confronted a group of students in their introductory data science course who had been accused of cheating and falsifying their attendance records. The professors grew suspicious when they received dozens of nearly identical apology emails from the accused students, which they soon discovered had been generated using artificial intelligence.
The incident occurred on October 17, when the professors read aloud the less-than-genuine apologies in a large lecture hall, projecting the emails on a screen for all to see. The students’ laughter in the background of the video footage indicated that they instantly recognized that AI was used to generate the emails.
The course, which has approximately 1,200 students divided into two sections, uses an application called the Data Science Clicker to track student engagement and attendance. Students are required to log in on their devices and answer multiple-choice questions within a set time frame when prompted by a QR code. Attendance and participation account for four percent of the final grade in the class, which is primarily taken by first-year students.
In early October, the professors noticed that dozens of absent students were still answering the questions. Upon investigating the issue by checking the number of times students refreshed the site, their devices’ IP addresses, and server logs, they concluded that the students had been tipped off about the questions and when to respond.
The professors sent emails to more than 100 students, informing them that their ruse had been discovered. While the university’s student code covers cheating and plagiarism, there are no specific rules addressing the use of AI. As a result, the students will not face disciplinary action, as their behavior did not violate the policies outlined in the course syllabus.
Former students of the course expressed disappointment in the current students’ actions, emphasizing the professors’ dedication to making the subject accessible and engaging. They noted that the course’s introductory nature and the professors’ commitment to student success made the use of AI for cheating and insincere apologies particularly disheartening.
Breitbart News previously reported on a company that developed a tool to monitor for AI cheating, which claimed that college students submitted 22 million papers that were mostly written by AI:
Last year, the company launched an AI writing detection tool and trained it on a slew of papers written by high school and college students, as well as known AI-generated content. Turnitin says its detector tool now has a false positive rate of less than one percent when examining entire documents.
Turnitin noted that its detector tool has analyzed more than 200 million student-submitted papers and found that 11 percent of them appear to be at least 20 percent made up of AI-generated written language, with three percent of the papers being at least 80 percent written by AI.
Read more at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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