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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

Am I understanding that they trained their model on the real course materials, including specific assignments, exercises, and even the actual tests, without the institution's permission?

I don't see a problem with rescinding the prize and punishing the kids for dishonesty.

It's not a free-for-all no matter how much OpenAI wants it to be.

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No, I don't think you're understanding correctly. The students first pitched an idea explicitly based on users uploading "specific assignments, exercises, and even the actual tests" to their tool, and the institution approved this idea and gave them $10,000 to build it.

The change that prompted the suspension seems to be about the technical details of how users upload those files - using the Canvas API instead of manually downloading and uploading. Either way, there is no dishonesty alleged by anyone, even the school Honor Council.

Also, the tool did not use OpenAI or any other third-party AI service, so whatever opinions you have about OpenAI are not relevant.

Student could upload their own material, which I think is fine as long as you use it personally. The intention was to connect to the school system with all course materials, but that never took place.

The article quotes them as planning to train their model on course materials automatically. But it is not clear if that actually happened. Individual students were always free to upload course materials.

I'm not sure what is dishonest about that.

Edit: I'm not sure if the article has been updated from when I first skimmed it, or I just missed it, but this seems directly addressed now:

> The students were also accused of “disseminating course material” by allowing students to use their own, individualized Canvas API tokens to connect Eightball directly so they did not have to upload PDFs to the tool themselves. “The upgrade did not change what students could upload to Eightball or what learning materials Eightball could produce upon request,” the suspended students’ lawyers note in the lawsuit.

Yeah, it sounds like they were upfront about connecting it to the system in the original competition, but never actually received permission to do so after that. They just assumed they had permission.

The "it can be used to cheat" thing is just dumb and is totally on the university for selecting them in the first place if that was a problem.

> They just assumed they had permission.

Being given money by the system's owner to do it does sound a bit like permission to me...

i imagine that the people giving the money out and the people who then claim not to have given permission might be different persons. still, a lawsuit on that premise will probably result in a nice settlement.

We could extrapolate that the diplomas given out by said university have no value because some other department could decide after the fact to cancel them :)

the degrees are conferred by the highest authority at the university, the board of regents/trustees. the only reason they would rescind a degree would be evidence of academic fraud/plagiarism in the course of earning the credits for the degree.

That's the theory, yes. But the institution has already shown it can arbitrarily change its mind...

It is not really clear to me if it had privileged access to answers or if it saw the same material a student would see reading through the syllabus + assigned readings.

It's the latter. It sounds like they got suspended because they told their users (i.e students) to give them their canvas API tokens so that they could fetch course materials on their behalf.

Previously, students had to download the PDFs and manually upload them. If students gave eightball their API tokens, eightball could fetch their course materials on their behalf.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's how it reads to me.

From TFA: <<university’s IT department was angry that the company allowed students to connect their own Canvas API tokens to the app>>

Just a wild guess, but maybe the IT department gets charged an additional fee from Canvas based on the usage of API tokens?

Conflicts like these are always about money, one way or another.

Conflicts in bureaucracies like universities are often petty power struggles rather than anything financial. Especially between IT departments and anyone else.

> give them their canvas API tokens

in pretty much every single system's terms, providing someone else your tokens or other forms of sharing of credentials is expressly forbidden. this is why I am flabbergasted things like Plaid work. I will never provide a 3rd party my credentials to anything but damn sure not something like a bank or credit card.

There are many systems that allow generating a API token to be used with other apps. The article clearly indicates that this school learning system, “Canvas”, had such a functionality until it was removed during this saga, apparently by hiding it with CSS or something since there was an “inspect element” workaround to still access it.

Plaid uses OAuth for many of their connections and doesn’t violate ToS in that case. There usually are TOS related to not sharing your password and disclaiming liability if you do.

3rd party access is the entire point of API tokens. Use cases like this are why Canvas has them.

I think it is pretty clear they did not have privileged access. Either because they never connected to the courseware service, or because they did so with students' credentials.

Edit: I'm not sure if I just missed it earlier or the article has been updated, but this issue is directly addressed now:

To which “dishonesty” do you refer?

The dishonesty of building exactly what you said you would build and being forthright about how you accomplished it such that a technicality of how you accessed the data gets you suspended.

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