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.
Article doesn’t say if he used AI to wholesale write his paper, which obviously is cheating, or if he used it as a resource like Google. Some details would be nice here.
I don’t think using it as a resource would be a good thing. It’s not a good tool for that. But I think it’s perfectly ok to use it for making nice sentenses out of the data you found in other resources.
If you click through to the court document the most detail it goes into is
During the meeting, RNH recounted that he used an AI tool to generate ideas and shared that he also created portions of his notes and scripts using the AI tool. RNH discussed using Grammarly, and indicated that he pasted sections from Grammarly into the Google document.
RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so. Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted.
Yeah, I’m on the fence because I do totally see how it can help and be a tool, at the same time though it can spit out a passable paper in minutes without much effort. I will say my knee-jerk reaction is if the school didn’t want it used, they should say so; I remember a time when I had to sign a paper saying I wouldn’t attempt to use a calculator (the teacher insisted no one would ever have one if they needed to find an unknown angle).
