EAST LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) – While college students have long left campuses around the state, the future of artificial intelligence and education is still murky and ever-changing as technology develops.
What used to be done by paying someone online to write your paper can now be done with a short prompt entered into a chat message.
While some universities are keeping an eye on how students use A.I., others have concerns about cracking down.
“We can look at generative A.I. as a tool, as something we can use but we got to remember not to use it for, I’ll use the term, evil, use it for something that doesn’t help us or our learning,” said Assistant Director of the MSU Office of Student Support and Accountability, Jake Kasper.
Kasper has seen a few cases of students trying to pass off computer-generated work as their own.
Kasper said university policies outline that students need to submit their own work, but he understands the role A.I. can play in the classroom.
“The ethical lines will be blurred and we will need to kind of figure out what [are] the standards for learning. How do we prepare our students for the future and how do we assess student learning with this new technology,” said Kasper.
MSU has already been using software called “Turnitin” to check student’s work for plagiarism and now a new feature can also help detect work that may have been submitted with the help of A.I.
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Miles away though, at the University of Michigan Dearborn, the school is taking a different approach believing detectors have a higher chance of reporting a false positive than finding real plagiarism.
“It’s not a great thing for our students, right, to be put in a spot where they might be accused of using A.I. when they were not supposed to when they actually didn’t. and they is no way they can defend themselves,” said Director of Digital Education, Christopher Casey.
He said the campus is also not allowing third-party A.I. detection systems to be used to investigate cheating cases. But he agrees with Kasper there is still a place for artificial intelligence in the classroom and even beyond.
Casey said the U of M Dearborn campus has a task force reviewing best practices for A.I. and expects a report to be ready by the start of the fall semester.
