And even as we understandably fret over academic integrity, we can do so with empathy for students forced into a new reality fraught with blurry lines and impossible choices. The goal here is not to forbid AI use, lay a trap or create perfect accountability, but rather to reclaim some responsibility for the academic integrity of our classes. Just as we don’t want students offloading too much of their work onto machines, we should be careful about offloading our responsibilities onto students.
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- So it’s possible you could choose wrong and finish your classes without skills you’ll need.
- In these moments, you consider this strange new reality of powerful technology and unenforceable rules.
- Wendy Brown, an influential theorist of neoliberalism, defines responsibilization as “the moral burdening of the entity at the end of the pipeline of power and authority.
- It is possible to see such spaces as freeing rather than constricting, especially when we imbue them with freedom.
- Then again, you’re not sold on your major, and you’re not totally sure what profession you’ll land in, much less what knowledge and skills you’ll need once you get there.
- Some might say, as I have, that students are responsible for their own learning.
- It’s empowering in a way, but you can’t help wondering if this is something students should be responsible for.
And even if she could sort through all this, the new combination of AI saturation and unenforceable AI policies still makes her the ultimate arbiter of academic integrity in a way no previous generation of students has been. Curriculum committees can design pathways through the institution based on their knowledge of what students will need and what society will need from them. Professors can argue that the skills they teach are essential, that proceeding through assignments in a particular way is most beneficial, that using AI this way but not that way is what she must do. At the end of the day, though, when it’s just her, her computer and a deadline, all those things aren’t much more than suggestions. It’s really up to her which skills she hones and which ones she outsources.
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So it’s possible you could choose wrong and finish your classes without skills you’ll need. It’s also possible you could buy an extra three hours that would really help relieve all the stress you’re feeling. In shifting much of the responsibility for upholding academic integrity from instructors to students, we leave students with an unfair burden, Daniel Cryer writes. Besides, you’ve done enough sleuthing to know that AI detectors aren’t reliable anyway. You doubt professors can even enforce these policies, so they’re not a big factor in your decision-making.
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Instead, you think about how much you like the class the paper is assigned in, or whether it’s in your major. These are papers you might actually enjoy writing, or ones that could help you develop a skill you’ll need later. Another professor says to use AI however you want, as long as you describe what you did in a short paragraph at the end of your paper—an “acknowledgments section,” he calls it. But that still leaves you with the decision of what to do and how much to disclose.
- At the end of the day, after all the lectures and policies, it seems like the weight of upholding them falls almost entirely on you.
- And even as we understandably fret over academic integrity, we can do so with empathy for students forced into a new reality fraught with blurry lines and impossible choices.
- I want their own voice and their developing ideas, both of which can be—even should be—a little messy.
- She thinks there might be learning benefits for certain uses, but she also worries that it might weaken her creativity or critical thinking skills, or spit out bad or biased information.
- We can also create these spaces for process-oriented lower-stakes assignments rather than for the big ones.
- I am a fan of technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
To Use AI or Not to Use AI? A Student’s Burden
What generative AI does, then, is intensify the responsibilization of college students, who do not have the ai content writer jobs resources necessary to exercise these responsibilities in a way likely to benefit them (and society) more broadly. As they try to decide which assignments are worth doing and which can be safely outsourced, they are essentially tasked with discerning what knowledge and which skills they will need in their future roles as employees and citizens. These are not questions we should expect them to know the answers to.
