Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

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> They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books".

As far as I am aware, they weren’t punished for using AI specifically, they were punished for straight up copypasting AI output thus violating cheating policies (in addition to hallucinating non-existent citations). Whether it was copypasted from AI or from another real person is irrelevant, the AI part just made it easier to prove in this particular case.

The school even affirmed in their statement that AI was allowed to be used for brainstorming topics or identifying topics (quote directly from the article):

“Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application”

the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world, there's quite the delta between copying off ai and plagiarism, copying off ai may annoy some people, but there's no law against it (at least right now)

> copying off ai may annoy some people, but there is no law against it

There is no law against plagiarizing on assignments by copying off a real human either, what’s your point?

If AI generated an assignment paper for me, and I simply copypasted it and turned it in as my own, I don’t see it being materially different from the same being done with a paper written by another human (rather than AI).

> the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world

The purpose of each individual class is to teach students the skills that the class is supposed to teach. If the class in the OP was on proper usage of AI, that would be a different story, but it wasn’t.

Similarly, you wouldn’t write your own memory allocator in the real world, you would use an existing library for that. That doesn’t mean you will get away with just simply importing an existing memory allocator library in your assignment code and calling it a day.

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