A new headache for honest students: Proving they didn't use AI

A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.

- Callie Holtermann

She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15 per cent of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an artificial intelligence chatbot.

“My heart just freaking stops,” said Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.

But Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous output of a chatbot. According to Google Docs editing history that was reviewed by The New York Times, she had drafted and revised the assignment over the course of two days. It was flagged anyway by a service offered by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin that aims to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.

Panicked, Burrell appealed the decision. Her grade was restored after she sent a 15-page PDF of time-stamped screenshots and notes from her writing process to the chair of her English department.

Still, the episode made her painfully aware of the hazards of being a student — even an honest one — in an academic landscape distorted by AI cheating.

Generative AI tools including ChatGPT are reshaping education for the students who use them to cut corners. According to a Pew Research survey conducted last year, 26 per cent of teenagers said they had used ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the rate of the previous year. Student use of AI chatbots to compose essays and solve coding problems has sent teachers scrambling for solutions.

But the specter of Al misuse, and the imperfect systems used to root it out, may also be affecting students who are following the rules. In interviews, high school, college and graduate students described persistent anxiety about being accused of using AI on work they had completed themselves and facing potentially devastating academic consequences.