The ideas expressed in this column do not necessarily represent those of The New Courier.

The Use of AI in College Courses: Some Fish are Caught and Some Swim Away

By Barrett Funderburk
March 1, 2024

It’s funny to consider that we’ve been saying “it’s advancing faster than we can keep up” for multiple years by this point. Technology is only as noble as the people who use it, and the people who use it for nefarious purposes are only going to get more sneaky and deceptive about it. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used to cover a wider range of advancing digital technology. The ability to generate any type of text, speech, image, and video is undeniably beyond our comprehension. Some professors are saying it’ll steal our jobs before we finish college, and companies both new and old are jumping in and developing technologies of their own. Most importantly, ordinary people with access to a computer and internet are using it for their own purposes.

Crisp cool wind of autumn blew across the farms and pastures of northern Batavia in the Fall semester of 2022. The world was finally coming back together after being locked in their homes for nearly two years. Slowly, but surely, more people started their 2022-23 year at community college in-person again. And what a relief it was to finally be able to talk to real people without the need for a screen. But a storm was brewing; dark clouds loomed on the horizon as ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, just in time for finals.

Students who grew up on the internet and freshly hot off the heels of cheating their entire way through the pandemic were a bit too quick to embrace this modern technology. Professors at the time called it the wild west, a free-for-all, unmanageable chaos condensed into copy/pasted blocks of text. Nothing was safe from AI’s reach.

To say there were loopholes would be an understatement. It was more akin to a
fish net. Students who wanted to play this new game while simultaneously keeping
their nose clean found themselves in a unique predicament. Around the Spring 2023
semester the plagiarism statements were updated and found in many professors’
syllabus, written in parentheses, “including AI generated work.” However, if by going
strictly off the letter of the law, it was only truly applicable for course work that needed to be written in essays. By throwing in that quote, therein lies the professor’s power to mark down a student caught using it for their written work. At the same time, students continued to find increasingly sneaky ways to undermine the rules and falsely over perform on their academics. The use of this recent technology is blurry and complicated, and as AI progressively gets better, so will the people who use it.

Around the Fall 2023 semester, the simple fact remained that the faculty and administration considered the use of most AI generated work to be cheating. But by this point most people who tried it when it was new had already made up their minds about using it or not, and those who did use it got caught in the net. Some fish got out, and the rest are still swimming along. Those who use it to cheat on their essays and exams know that counter measures are in place, as websites like Turnitin are using their own versions of AI to fight fire with fire. Swimming through this ocean of madness was always going to be a daunting task for both the faculty and administration, but there is a much bigger prize worth catching than just a school of fish.