Academic Integrity & AI
Michael Taber
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Academic integrity
Of sickness makes sickness,
Contagion of trust can make trust.
--Marianne
Moore, American poet
from “In Distrust of Merits” (1943)
The College’s
definitions and policies about academic misconduct are laid out here. Ignorance of such matters is no excuse.
Academic misconduct can result in automatic failure of the course, regardless
of how well a student has been doing on other assignments. In addition,
extra-course penalties may be pursued, like being prohibited from ever
re-taking the class.
“So, what about
using a chatbot?”
Using AI,
including platforms like ChatGPT or Claude, can be helpful as a tool in
studying for exams. There’s no guarantee that the info you get from it will be
accurate or to the point of the question. So you have to refuse to surrender your good judgment. It’s
ill-advised to parrot what a chatbot tells you the answer is, just as it is to
assume that the first hit on a Google search for “best Thai restaurant near me”
will delight your palate.
“OK, but what about for writing papers?
AI can also be
useful as a resource for getting clear on some issues that you would need to
understand in order to write the paper, as would
consulting Wikipedia or YouTube videos. In order, that is for YOU to write the
paper.
1. It’s fine by me
for you to use AI as a RESOURCE, pre-writing.
As for editing a
draft you have written, the editing tools in Microsoft Word or on a Google doc
are useful for catching misspellings (Word’s red, squiggly underlining) or
targeted grammar slip-ups (like the blue, squiggly underlining with using a
plural noun with a singular verb). The software for these is not based on LLMs
(large language models), and so it’s up to the author—which, recall, is
unambiguously you—to accept or reject each proposed change. (And don’t
accept uncritically—you’d be missing an opportunity to *learn* how a proposed
revision of, say, a given wording is an improvement. (Assuming, of course, that
it even is an improvement.)
What’s not fine
is using AI (including platforms like Grammarly) to edit your paper, which
amounts to using AI to re-write (hence, to write, as in “to write again”) your
paper. This would violate the College’s policy on academic integrity, for you’d be representing as your own work some work that is
at least partially not your own. No different than having a roommate write,
say, a concluding paragraph to your paper, and then handing it in as your own
work.
2. It’s def NOT fine
by me for you to use AI as an EDITOR, while writing or post-writing.
The most obvious
place where AI software should NOT be used is as an author. For YOU are
the author, and to represent the work of another (whether of another person or
of a software application) as if it were YOUR work is
clearly plagiarism. As with using any other source, you should not copy and
paste into your paper any content you did not create.
3. It’s def NOT fine by me for you to use AI as an AUTHOR, doing the
writing.
Good (and short!)
tutorials on topics like samples of acceptable and unacceptable paraphrases can
be found at a page put up by Indiana University: https://plagiarism.iu.edu/
Send me mail: mstaber at smcm dot edu
Go to Michael Taber's home page.
Go to the SMCM home page.