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.
Is AI more like a calculator, or more like copy/pasting Wikipedia articles without attribution?
It’s not really a calculator because it gives different answers. Newer moldels can give attribution (e.g. bing copilot).
My opinion is that LLMs are not going to go away. Testing needs to adapt to focus on the human element. Marks are no longer lost for bad handwriting.
Just like when I was a kid using Wikipedia for research when it wasn’t acceptable, the expectation should be that you use it to understand the material and then follow it to the source material to read that or at least find a relevant quote that lets you repeat that wikipedia said in your own words with attribution.
Copying wiki, or copying the output of an LLM, are both similarly academically fraudulent. LLMs are just more likely to also be wrong.
Mostly Agreed. I think the “in your own words” part will be debated strongly over the next few years. Will proof of writing your own prompt be sufficient?