Encouraging generative AI use

We have been encouraging our students to use generative AI tools (while also understanding the risks) for over a year now. This has been supported by our AI guidelines, which are underpinned by our values of Ako and Pono. However, we are still having regular conversations with students who are afraid to use the tools or are relying on them a bit too heavily in assessments that need more of a human touch.

In the interest of an equitable approach to AI literacy, we decided it was important to support all of our learners in understanding how they can use these powerful tools to experiment and learn without the fear of being ‘caught cheating’. In addition, I wanted to test how reliable AI detection checkers were and make the case that you probably could use AI and not be detected, but I also wanted to discuss, ‘Is that what we are here for?' Overall, I was angling for an approach of radical transparency to enable learning.

A catalyst for the session was this example of how Chat-GPT has been used in peer-reviewed journal articles. See for yourself; you just have to enter “as of my last knowledge update” or a similar AI-bot-specific turn of phrase, such as “I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information,” into Google Scholar. It won’t take you long to find an article that has slipped through the net.

CONTENT TYPE IS NOT SUPPORTED.

I found this quite shocking and used the example to point out that the use of AI in academic work is rife, and even blatant misuse can go undetected in the first instance.

So, how do you cheat?

It will only take a quick search on YouTube and a 3.5-minute investment in a 7-minute video watched at 2x speed to work out how to evade Turnitin and all other plagiarism detectors—hence the overly enthusiastic clickbait image for this post!

How to avoid getting caught cheating with AI