“Believable typos”
Even before A.I. chatbots, the internet had made cheating easier, in part through the simple mechanism of copy-and-paste plagiarism.
Now, the landscape is more complex. About two-thirds of American students are using A.I. regularly for schoolwork, according to recent surveys. While only a small slice — about 9 percent — admitted to outright cheating in one large study, much A.I. use lies in an ethical gray area.
A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the most popular A.I. tools among students.
But just beneath these behemoths is a roiling, fiercely competitive market of legacy ed-tech purveyors and tiny start-ups, all using social media to tell young people that their academic lives could be easier — much easier — if they embrace A.I.
Some start-ups explicitly teach students how to cheat.