The Thin Line Between Academic Integrity and AI

“If you guys use AI on this assignment, you will get a zero.” This is a sentence that most students nowadays have heard before. Due to the rapid progression of AI, academic integrity is impacted tremendously and questions about the topic of AI in collaboration with school work arise daily. Many students take advantage of their access to AI by using generative tools such as ChatGPT, or paraphrasers like QuillBot to do their assignments for them. 

Artificial Intelligence, just as everything else, has its positive and negative effects in today’s world. The advancements made in AI are able to boost productivity and optimize data handling to save time. It is also able to generate quick and simple (or very lengthy) answers for users. Unfortunately, the constant updates and integration of AI into the daily lives of humans allows them to misuse the tools. 

Specifically in the realms of schools or colleges, students tend to misuse their access to Generative AI tools. Being stressed by an overwhelming amount of schoolwork is a communal experience for many students. When this feeling occurs, some may find that their only solution is to enter their assignment into an AI tool and copy and paste the result, maybe even putting it through a paraphrasing tool first. 

The problem with this conundrum is that Generative AI tools do not use new ideas, they scour the internet and its archives in order to gather information to fulfill the prompt. This makes most of AI’s answers plagiarism, since it does not come up with an original thought. In academia, especially classes which have to do with writing, plagiarism is frowned upon. Most assignments have one simple instruction, to answer a question with one’s own thoughts and ideas. Through the usage of AI on such assignments, the ideas are mostly unoriginal, they are other people’s opinions, therefore they are plagiarized.

Another unfortunate asset with the usage of AI is that it is unable to distinguish between facts and false information, so some of the answers students are looking for may even be completely or partially false. This is due to the fact that AI does not use original information, so anything that remotely relates to the prompt given to the tool will be considered and used to answer it. On a similar note, AI can give false positives and false negatives. Most AI tools consider every text on the internet as factual, which makes it difficult to obtain actual pros or cons. 

The definition of academic integrity, according to the University of Arizona, is “the ethical use of information, thoughts, and ideas from which we build original thought to contribute to the academic conversation.” This integrity is questioned by the use of AI to complete assigned school work. 

With the constant development of Artificial Intelligence, it is significant to know how to use it. AI can be a helpful tool for explaining math equations or summarizing texts. When used correctly, AI can strongly improve one’s academic performance. There are many more aspects to AI use which have not been mentioned or explored. As the conversation around AI’s role in education evolves, it is crucial to stay informed and uphold integrity, ensuring that ethical standards continue to guide academic practices.