Q&A

I just read a student essay and I am pretty sure that it is AI generated, but I don’t have proof. I know that AI detection software does not work, but I feel like I cannot let students get away with stuff like this!

I have noticed that using AI is a slippery slope – both for myself and for my students. What might start out as asking for feedback on a text that you fully intend to implement yourself after examining it critically and only addressing points that you agree with, quickly turns into AI drafting texts, which then might be more or less thoughtfully edited. How can I avoid getting lazy using these tools and losing skills to AI? And how can I help my students with this?

For some reason, this semester a lot of students responded to free-text questions on my course evaluations (usually nobody replies). While I am grateful on the one hand because there is of course a lot of very useful information in there that I will be able to learn a lot from, I am also overwhelmed and cannot possibly spend hours to analyse all of it. Can I upload it to AI and ask for a summary?

I have implemented an exercise in my course where students generate AI responses to a question and then critique it, with the goal of showing them that they cannot trust AI outputs. But when I gave that task two weeks ago, two students refused to do it, quoting environmental concerns. I myself am also worried about the environmental impact of AI, too, but that is just my gut feeling and not based on any data. Can you help?

I used to rely on essays written at home for course grades, but now with AI provided even by the university (and knowing that AI detectors do not work) this does not work any more. How should I redesign my assessment?

My student submitted a text and I am 99% sure that it is written by AI. It uses all those words that are all over AI-generated texts, like “thus”, and “leverage”, and I just feel it in my gut. So I uploaded the student’s text to ChatGPT and asked “did you write this?” and it confirmed that it had written it. I even uploaded it to one of those AI checkers, and it gave me a score of 83% AI generated. I confronted the student, but they deny having used ChatGPT or any other AI at all. What can I do? I don’t want to escalate this if I am not 100% sure.

A master student wants to use AI to generate an image in their thesis. The publisher of the original image does not respond to attempts to contact them, and the student really wants to use this image and says they need it. The image is a photograph of some structure they are discussing in the thesis through a microscope. I do not think generating and using an AI image is right thing to do. What should I do?