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 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, 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.