A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.
Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.
Horseshit.
There was aggregation of data before chatGPT that still exists and it was in fact advertised as a good place to start your research: Wikipedia. You go and do your own reading based on guidance and then write an original paper. Before that, they had a version in writing called the encyclopedia which recommended additional reading (depending on edition).
It is a CLEAR instance of plagiarism to copy and paste from Wikipedia, and totally fine to use its cited sources for your own research. This is exactly the same. If you use the same verbiage, or copy the facts directly (which btw may be totally wrong, because AI says we need to eat rocks) then it’s plagiarism. Someone else has done the work and not been given credit.
Done. Period.
You can ask the librarian, chat gpt, Wikipedia, reddit, your mom, or a local hobo to recommend you reading material and that is fine. Taking their work and calling it your own is not fine. This isn’t brain surgery.
Can you show me where in the article it says the AI wrote the paper or that he copied and pasted the paper from the AI? It doesn’t say that, you filled in the blanks that weren’t there and got upset at the rage bait story. The kid was in the wrong, but if you ask Google, your mom, or the librarian for to help you find sources to write your paper it is the same as asking AI to give you a list of sources to write a research paper. If you asked the last one for the list of sources, it is using AI to help you write it… Which I don’t think should qualify as getting detention.
He likely was an idiot and copy pasted as you said, we just don’t know that information from the article.
I’m not upset at any story, Im perplexed by your supposition that he may very well be getting in trouble for getting a lIt review to guide his research from an AI.
The blanks are easily filled because: 1. Collecting references is not something that is an academic problem (nor is it traceable in this way), 2. nowhere in the article does it say the parents lawsuit contests the use of AI, nor attempt to paint it as something so reasonable as (1), and 3. generating text responses is literally the function of an llm.
Sure, there are benign uses of llms for research like summarizing ideas or writing an outline, but that would be a) hard to prove, and b) if that’s the case it’s the first sentence of the lawsuit that it’s not plagiarism to do that.
I mean what would a lawyer see in taking this case if it were that simple. I would think we are missing a lot of details. I mean clearly he isn’t going to get into those prestigious schools after suing his current school. So something is strange. Sorry about using the term upset though, it’s hard to put tone to text, so when your first word was a cuss word I took it as upset.
I’m not really concerned about word choice here, so no worries.
I would wager that this has little or no effect on school choice unless he’s actively in the application process now, and even then it’s not like there’s a disclosure that needs to be made (i.e., please check this box if you’re engaged in active litigation).
Having watched election- and politics-related lawsuits for basically 8 years in the US, it seems like for enough money you can get a lawyer on board for just about anything. I can also imagine this as a potential “easy win”: sue a public school to death and bury in paperwork, they eventually settle out of court because the cost is less than fielding a team of lawyers on public tax dollars. This is, of course, provided the case isn’t just dismissed out of hand. IANAL but this flavor of approach is pretty successfully used by patent trolls.
I have a hard time seeing ANY additional depth to this story: teachers don’t work in a vacuum, schools aren’t typically litigious, and the school pre-releases their expectations in a handbook. If this is a loser, the admin says sorry and reverses grades much more easily than going to court.
Seems like this is simple entitlement fueled by money to me.