We have penalties for plagiarism. If you’re a student, it can result in suspension or expulsion. If you’re in the workforce or a creative field, it can result in fines and legal actions. While it’s true that anyone who’s ever created a piece of art or an essay probably got a whiff of their ideas from others before them, we have some fair-use cases in the legal world that are well documented. And anyone who’s completed school past the 6th grade knows how to cite a borrowed concept or image. Grammarly, the popular spell and grammar checker, has a paid version with an automatic citation generator and a plagiarism checker that checks your work against 16 billion web pages.
Academics have become apoplectic over students' ability to use AI to generate essays and papers, and even pass exams. Every university and most high schools are thinking about what role AI should play in education. The Seattle,
LA, and NYC school districts have already banned ChatGPT in the classroom. (Remember that calculators were once banned from classrooms,
too.)
Ultimately cooler heads will prevail. Academics realize that AI is going to be part and parcel of any student’s experience and the sooner they create the rubric for exploring it with students the better they’ll be prepared for life’s work.
To me, an easy start would be to take the same old rules we used in the real world and start applying them to AI. Citing that a paragraph was created by ChatGPT in your footnotes should become common practice. And an end-statement of every written work should begin to include a list of AI tools that helped formulate the paper. It may not be the full answer, but
it’s a start.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about how AI should be used and attributed in schools (and in your own work, of course). Leave your thoughts on our community board. |