College Students Who Get Caught Using AI to Cheat Make Me Sick
Every week during the school year I come across a similar story. I'm pretty sure the New York Times alone has done about 10 of them. They all have the same theme. More and more college students are using AI to complete their assignments. Like, a shocking amount. Except it shouldn't be shocking in the least. It should be the most obvious thing in the world to everyone. Of course college students are using the tools at their disposal to make their immediate lives easier. It would be insane to think they wouldn't. I would be embarrassed for them if they weren't using AI to some extent.
I don't have a problem with students who use AI to help write their papers. I'd be doing the the same if I was still in school. I knew my way around SparkNotes back in 2013. I knew which professors were lazy and used the same questions year after year, or simply pulled their assignments off the internet. I knew how to find those "academic" websites where former students had taken the time to post the answers to those very questions. I'm not above cheating. But I wouldn't get fucking caught. It's the students who get caught, specifically with AI written papers, that genuinely disgust me.
This is from an article the New York Times posted last week. The premise of the story is just like all the others. Some professor realizes that a crazy percentage of his students are cheating and he calls them out for it. It's what happens next that is so phenomenally lazy it actually bums me out.
When the professors realized how widespread this was, they contacted the 100-ish students who seemed to be cheating. “We reached out to them with a warning, and asked them, ‘Please explain what you just did,'” said Fagen-Ulmschneider in an Instagram videodiscussing the situation.
Apologies came back from the students, first in a trickle, then in a flood. The professors were initially moved by this acceptance of responsibility and contrition… until they realized that 80 percent of the apologies were almost identically worded and appeared to be generated by AI.
What in the fuck are these kids doing? For students these days to have the benefit of a tool like ChatGPT, something that makes school SO MUCH easier for them, and STILL find a way to fuck it up. That is such a slap in the face to the cheaters who came before them. A slap in the face to those of us who used to hunker down and read multiple paragraphs of synopsis (as opposed to the entire 25 page chapter), or sit there and grind out a full 8-minute recap video (of the feature length foreign art film we were assigned to watch). Many of us would have legitimately sucked a dick to have ChatGPT available to us in college. Not me. I wasn't that dumb. But for a magic genie that gives you free answers... bet a lot of people would have. And I bet nowadays, state schools across America are littered with students who would sooner sell their bodies (for sexual favors) than live in a world where they don't have AI to answer everything for them.
What pisses me off the most is that using AI should so easy to get away with. It has to be. Just go through your ChatGPT written paper and change some things up. Re-write the paper in your own words. Maybe even get really crazy and add an original thought or two. If remixing sentences was all I had to do for a homework assignment back in college, I wouldn't even have called it homework. It would be some semi-tedious bullshit I'd knock it out while high as balls on the couch watching football. But even doing that is apparently too much for students these days.
When it comes to this story in particular... I cannot fathom getting caught cheating, using AI to form your apology, then having the audacity not even bother taking the time to remove the long fucking hashes–which everyone in the world knows is the telltale sign of an AI written paper. It's sickening. It is so far beyond pathetic. It doesn't even make me mad from the standpoint of, "it's so sad our society has come to this". Not that it isn't sad. But I'm mostly just flabbergasted at how impossibly dumb and unappreciative these kids are. How could you ever feel comfortable turning that apology in? They must know professors are checking for AI by now. To care so little about getting caught... when you're in college... which is a beautiful magical fantasy world... you have the time of your lives right there in front of you for the next four (probably five) years... and risk it all because you don't have it in you to take 15 minutes to clean up some obviously AI-written material. Fuck you, guys. Seriously. Fuck you.
But at the same time, who can blame them? Because in this case, nobody even gets in trouble. They received nothing more than a stern, "Hey! Don't do that!"
So on October 17, during class, Flanagan and Fagen-Ulmschneider took their class to task, displaying a mash-up image of the apologies, each bearing the same “sincerely apologize” phrase. No disciplinary action was taken against the students, and the whole situation was treated rather lightly—but the warning was real. Stop doing this. Flanagan said that she hoped it would be a “life lesson” for the students.
Do you know what a better "life lesson" for the students would be? Kicking them out of school. Not for cheating. But for being so fucking careless. For having so little respect for the art of it. Learning how to bend the rules and get away with cheating at least takes some level of critical thinking. And sometimes, from that, you learn the lesson that had you simply done the assignment the right way, it would have saved you time in the long run. Those are things you learn in college that can help you navigate the world. But if college students aren't even thinking to cheat anymore, then I don't what they're even getting out of it other than a good time and a piece of paper that said they went. I truly don't know how a person can think it's safe to turn in an unedited AI paper, and at the same time be a functioning human being in their day-to-day life. If you're dumb enough to do that, you should never have been accepted into college in the first place.