My combinatorics and writing class categorically ban AI. But realistically, students are going to use chatbots because it is a helpful learning and tutoring tool. So what happens when someone gets referred to OSSJA for cheating? Do they defer to the professor’s rule of absolutely no AI? Or do they try to figure out the nuances of this specific case?

I think it is especially important to get this policy right before we have to consider what constitutes violating academic integrity and whether to punish a student. It is very easy to unfairly treat a student when you and the world don’t really know what qualifies as wrongdoing in AI. Not to mention giving harsh treatment to set an example.

This brings up a critical question: If a student uses an AI to ask them questions for brainstorming or to rephrase their own sentences for clarity, but the syllabus bans AI, what does that student’s referral to OSSJA look like?

Because I think it would be bad for a student to get a 0 or expelled because of unnuanced AI usage guidelines. It damages the student and school community’s morale and trust, even if the student is eventually cleared of wrongdoing. The status quo says you are violating student conduct and a cheater if you disagree with the current policy. Do you really have to get punished by OSSJA so the world can make progress on this question?

The main thing is the gray area, and writing examples are especially ambiguous. For example: I use AI to ask me questions to brainstorm. I copy and paste my writing into AI to ask for feedback. AI gives me suggestions that I implement. I make the AI only output words I’ve already written. This is all gray area.

AI exists on a continuum¹. Copy and pasting AI for your entire essay, using Grammarly for spell checking, and arguably even search engines all exist on this spectrum.

This forces us to ask: What is the professor’s actual learning objective? If the goal is for me to learn how to build a narrative essay, is a tool that helps me brainstorm and structure that narrative a ‘shortcut’ or just a ‘tool’?

So it has to be clear what counts as wrongdoing before the student gets punished. How did spellcheck, text editors, and Wikipedia become accepted tools? I just don’t think it is reasonable for a blanket ban to be standard. The closest analogy I can think of is what colleges did at the advent of Wikipedia. Just like Wikipedia, there were obviously good uses for it that didn’t deserve an outright ban in the oughts.