By Hannah Stuver, Reporter
Edited by Isabella Bane, Editor
MOUNT BERRY, Ga. – Artificial Intelligence has complicated academic standards of plagiarism between students and professors.
As use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has increased within higher education, many questions have developed about its proper use in academics. A student at the University of North Georgia, Marley Stevens, failed an assignment after claiming to have used the grammar and spelling checker, Grammarly. The professor used an AI checking software, Turnitin, which flagged the entire paper. This put her on academic probation, causing her to lose scholarships.
After the story went viral on TikTok, students and faculty have started looking for answers to what use of generative AI counts as plagiarism. There are many uses for AI in academics because of its generative capabilities, but this makes it difficult to define what part of a student’s work is original.
As information on AI continues to expand, it is important that students communicate with faculty about AI policies for each class. Chris Whitmire, visiting clinical instructor of creative technology and affiliate faculty of computer science at Berry College, said that “if those expectations are just made very, very clear, upfront, day one, in the syllabus, a lot of these problems can actually be avoided.” As a Professor of Creative Technology, Whitmire said that he allowed his students to use AI if they were able to cite it and explain in depth how they used it in their work.
An Associate Professor of Communication at Berry College, Dr. Kimberly Field-Springer, said that in her Principles of Public Relations class, students often use generative AI for planning content. It is becoming increasingly used to streamline public relations firms in the professional world. “AI is great for brainstorming, but where we draw the line is we’re not having AI write our papers or our content for us, because we’re still the content creators. We need to be communicating authentically to our public,” said Dr. Field-Springer. In all career pathways, it is important that students are aware that their use of AI could affect their performance and credibility.
Curry Teems, a senior creative writing student, minoring in public relations, said “It can give you a ton of ideas, but you ultimately have to take those a step further to make them interesting and engaging.” If students expect to perform well in the professional world, they also need to understand AI’s limitations both creatively and ethically.
AI responds to prompts with data and creates a response based on word by word predictive text. “It has no knowledge of what is true, it just knows what word is reasonable to say” said Whitmire. Unless a student has expert knowledge in the field, there is no way to guarantee that the information is correct or gives credit to the appropriate author. Plagiarism checking tools do not understand the difference between Grammarly and generative AI yet, so students must educate themselves to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
If students choose to incorporate the use of AI, they must be made aware of the potential consequences of using programs that do not filter for validity. They should be prepared to take responsibility for false information that may be produced or presented in their research. When students make efforts to clarify expectations of appropriate uses, there is little room for
misunderstanding, which ensures that students are both gaining practice in tools that they might be expected to use in their future careers and are not at risk of facing unnecessary consequences.