A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.
Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.
Dude, the fact that the student has to use AI tools to get by, does not mean he’s going to be a success story in life. It just means he’s going to find shortcuts and exploits to make things easier over everyone else that had to do things the natural way. This is no different than someone using calculators in math tests where it’s not allowed. This is no different than someone simply peeking over another’s work and copying down. Using AI generative tools to gain an advantage is in the same ballpark.
So these entitled parents and that entitled student can go get fucked. I hope these universities see this and recognize that this student is a borderline cheater and hopefully deny him anyways if this gets overturned.
In my 20+ year career (god I’m old) every time I felt like I was cheating I was praised for figuring out a faster way to do it.
Granted, the point of education is to learn something and having an AI spit out an essay means you’ve failed at demonstrating your knowledge.
But let’s not pretend that using shortcuts isn’t rewarded outside of school.
…if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it, and you perfect that way and you will have it in pretty good shape.
If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.
But also, if you get caught cheating you just own it, you don’t whine about getting caught.
I can’t possibly see anything that could go wrong with this attitude. Nope. Nothing whatsoever could possibly go wrong. This is all perfectly normal and not even slightly destructively solipsistic.
