The development of artificial intelligence over the last year has created opportunities for it to develop into a useful learning tool, but it has also become an easy way to cheat through assignments. Particularly, with the advent of OpenAI o1, a language model capable of complex reasoning, problems previously thought unsolvable with AI are now easily crackable.
In response, department policies about AI have become stricter, though they remain centered around Lion Tracks, which considers the usage of AI presented as one’s own work as plagiarism.
“The AI policy is representative of what is present in our Lion Tracks,” said History and Social Sciences Department Chair David Fisher. “That essentially means any unautho
rized use of AI which involves the presentation of work that isn’t a student’s own will be considered plagiarism.”
This rule against AI plagiarism is universal among the departments, also being a major concern for the English Department.
“We rely on the Lion Tracks statement,” English Department Chair Michael Morris said. “Which is pretty clear and definitive: presenting AI as if it’s your own writing is very basic plagiarism.”
According to Fisher, the plagiarism problem relating to how AI is used is not new and has been a problem for quite some time. Tutors were also responsible for doing some work for students, making the new AI problem not too different from those of the past.
“In one sense, this is not a new problem,” Fisher said. “That problem existed before. AI just makes accessing that tutor a lot easier.”
While AI poses plagiarism related problems, it also promises a tool that can be useful in the classroom. Fisher acknowledges the usefulness of AI early on in works, especially in the planning stage of papers.
“It’s entirely possible that during the first of those steps, where you are looking for a subject or trying to organize your thoughts and so forth,” Fisher said, “you’re using AI in the classroom with the teacher as a way of organizing those ideas.”
While AI can be beneficial to students, in line with AI guidelines it can not be required for any assignment.
“The problem there has to do with privacy,” said Fisher. “We don’t want students to be put into a situation where they’re putting in information that is personal to them.”