While artificial intelligence started being introduced into society in the 1950s, the full effects are just setting in now. ChatGPT is a big problem starting to break out in academic environments. Students can put prompts/questions into an AI input, and get an entire essay written for them in seconds. Not only is this cheating, but it is also academic dishonesty. Moving forward, schools should punish students who use AI the same as students who get caught cheating. 

Schools are now faced with the decision on how students will be punished for this dishonesty. Students should face the same consequences they would face if they had cheated on an assignment. Plagiarism/academic dishonesty is currently punishable by a two hour detention at Big Spring. If a student allows someone to copy their work or if a student copies someone else’s work, they will face punishment. By copying what an AI is creating, that student is still cheating, and therefore should face the same punishment. Most schools at this point can agree that using AI counts as cheating. 

On the bright side, schools are getting better at detecting AI in students’ work. Websites like Turnitin.com and other AI detectors, allow teachers to see when their students are copying and pasting their assignments. There are websites that not only detect if work is AI, but there are also some that can tell teachers how long an assignment took for a student to write. This allows a teacher to show and prove when a student didn’t complete their work by themselves. AI detectors are one of the only ways a teacher can prove a student’s academic dishonesty, even when it is obvious their student didn’t write their own assignment. .

While websites like ChatGPT can be used to cheat, they can also be used in beneficial ways. People can use artificial intelligence to generate ideas to brainstorm, but using AI for further academic use becomes a problem. Grammarly is one example of helpful AI. Using Grammarly to fix spelling and punctuation errors is beneficial, as students are still writing all of their own work, they are just having artificial intelligence check their work. Even google docs and slides have spell check, which gives students insight, but doesn’t change the students’ work.