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.
According to Oxford, they define plagiarism as,
I think that covers 100% of your argument here.
LLMs can’t provide reference to their source materials without opening the business behind it to litigation. this means the LLM can’t request consent.
the child, in this case, cannot get consent from the original author that wrote the content that trained the LLM, cannot get consent from the LLM, and incorporated the result of LLM plagiarism into their work and attempted to pass it off as their own.
the parents are entitled and enabling pricks and don’t have legal ground to stand on.
LLMs are certainly trained without consent, but they exist to spot common patterns. It’s only likely to plagiarise if that text is also similar to lots of other text.
In fact, the academic practice of references and exact quotes has actually increased the tendency of statistical models to “plagiarise”.
LLM will continue to be a useful academic tool. We just have to learn how best to incorporate them into our testing.
After reading that the exam rules basically said not to use chatgpt or similar, I completely agree.