A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.
Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.
Academics are supposed to get people ready to participate in everyday life as an adult where you will have to be responsible for your actions. If they go into accounting, programming, journalism, engineering, marketing, or any other field that uses AI, he will need to know how to responsibly use it as you said.
It basically is a data aggregator, I would imagine it would be a great tool for a research project, you just need to teach the students to properly use it.
Usually it may be as simple as asking a question, “How many battles were there in the American Civil War”
It gives you an answer.
* “Where did you source that data from?”
The estimate of about 50 major battles and approximately 10,500 total engagements in the American Civil War is based on commonly accepted historical research. This data is derived from primary sources, such as the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (a 128-volume collection of reports from both Union and Confederate forces), and secondary sources, including analyses by Civil War historians.
For example, organizations like the American Battlefield Trust and historians such as James M. McPherson have compiled lists of major engagements, while smaller skirmishes are documented in historical military records. However, there is some variability in the total count depending on how engagements are classified (e.g., whether smaller skirmishes or raids are included).*
"What would be a good book for me to reference for a research project on this?
*For a research project on the American Civil War, several well-regarded books offer thorough coverage, blending military, political, and social history. Here are some excellent references:
“Battle Cry of Freedom” by James M. McPherson This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is widely considered one of the best single-volume accounts of the Civil War. It covers the causes, major battles, and aftermath, providing a comprehensive view of the war from both Union and Confederate perspectives.
“The Civil War: A Narrative” by Shelby Foote This is a three-volume series that offers a detailed and vivid narrative of the war, focusing on the military campaigns. Foote’s work is well-known for its storytelling style and meticulous attention to detail.
“This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust This book explores the cultural and societal impact of death during the Civil War and is a key resource for understanding the human cost of the conflict and its broader consequences on American society.
“For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War” by James M. McPherson This book uses soldiers’ letters and diaries to delve into the motivations and experiences of the men who fought. It’s a great complement if you’re focusing on the personal, psychological, or social aspects of the war.
“A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom” by David Williams This book offers a bottom-up view, focusing on the experiences of common soldiers, slaves, women, and civilians. It’s excellent for understanding the war beyond the battlefield and for exploring the social history aspects.
“Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin While not exclusively about the war’s battles, this book provides deep insight into the political environment surrounding Lincoln, his leadership during the war, and how he navigated the country through its most difficult time.
Each of these books can serve as a strong foundation for different aspects of a Civil War research project, depending on whether you’re focusing on military history, social impacts, or political dynamics. Let me know if you’d like more specific recommendations!
Going and acquiring those books would be considered using CharGPT, and mean I am now eligible to be placed in detention and mark my project down to a D according to the rules the school followed above.
Horseshit.
There was aggregation of data before chatGPT that still exists and it was in fact advertised as a good place to start your research: Wikipedia. You go and do your own reading based on guidance and then write an original paper. Before that, they had a version in writing called the encyclopedia which recommended additional reading (depending on edition).
It is a CLEAR instance of plagiarism to copy and paste from Wikipedia, and totally fine to use its cited sources for your own research. This is exactly the same. If you use the same verbiage, or copy the facts directly (which btw may be totally wrong, because AI says we need to eat rocks) then it’s plagiarism. Someone else has done the work and not been given credit.
Done. Period.
You can ask the librarian, chat gpt, Wikipedia, reddit, your mom, or a local hobo to recommend you reading material and that is fine. Taking their work and calling it your own is not fine. This isn’t brain surgery.
Can you show me where in the article it says the AI wrote the paper or that he copied and pasted the paper from the AI? It doesn’t say that, you filled in the blanks that weren’t there and got upset at the rage bait story. The kid was in the wrong, but if you ask Google, your mom, or the librarian for to help you find sources to write your paper it is the same as asking AI to give you a list of sources to write a research paper. If you asked the last one for the list of sources, it is using AI to help you write it… Which I don’t think should qualify as getting detention.
He likely was an idiot and copy pasted as you said, we just don’t know that information from the article.
I’m not upset at any story, Im perplexed by your supposition that he may very well be getting in trouble for getting a lIt review to guide his research from an AI.
The blanks are easily filled because: 1. Collecting references is not something that is an academic problem (nor is it traceable in this way), 2. nowhere in the article does it say the parents lawsuit contests the use of AI, nor attempt to paint it as something so reasonable as (1), and 3. generating text responses is literally the function of an llm.
Sure, there are benign uses of llms for research like summarizing ideas or writing an outline, but that would be a) hard to prove, and b) if that’s the case it’s the first sentence of the lawsuit that it’s not plagiarism to do that.
I mean what would a lawyer see in taking this case if it were that simple. I would think we are missing a lot of details. I mean clearly he isn’t going to get into those prestigious schools after suing his current school. So something is strange. Sorry about using the term upset though, it’s hard to put tone to text, so when your first word was a cuss word I took it as upset.
I’m not really concerned about word choice here, so no worries.
I would wager that this has little or no effect on school choice unless he’s actively in the application process now, and even then it’s not like there’s a disclosure that needs to be made (i.e., please check this box if you’re engaged in active litigation).
Having watched election- and politics-related lawsuits for basically 8 years in the US, it seems like for enough money you can get a lawyer on board for just about anything. I can also imagine this as a potential “easy win”: sue a public school to death and bury in paperwork, they eventually settle out of court because the cost is less than fielding a team of lawyers on public tax dollars. This is, of course, provided the case isn’t just dismissed out of hand. IANAL but this flavor of approach is pretty successfully used by patent trolls.
I have a hard time seeing ANY additional depth to this story: teachers don’t work in a vacuum, schools aren’t typically litigious, and the school pre-releases their expectations in a handbook. If this is a loser, the admin says sorry and reverses grades much more easily than going to court.
Seems like this is simple entitlement fueled by money to me.