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School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules
- mavelikara 2y agoFrom the parents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2V2QGzFDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2V2QGzFDU
- j_timberlake 2y agoHOLD IT! It would be a disservice to the law to not attain all the facts before rendering a judgement. We need to hear testimony from the AI itself!
- rolph 2y agoai hallucinated citations to non existent publications. in this case, the ai should publish the cited hallucinated works on amazon to make it real. not that it would help us, but the ai will have its bases covered.
- smitelli 2y agoThen they could train the next generation of models on those works. Nothing to scrape or ingest, since they already have the text on hand!
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoOne of the hallucinated authors is literally named "Jane Doe". Our society is about to become powerfully stupid.
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoIn legal cases that is how one can choose to remain anonymous. See, there's stuff even geniuses dont know.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThat's not relevant to this. It's a direct quote from the work the students handed in.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoWhy do you think the previous poster found that name notable? Just because it's inherently funny sounding or something?
- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- Loughla 2y agoDoE is the department of energy. The department of education is ED. I laughed out loud when I saw that McMahon was his pick. A fucking wrestling star for the department of education. This is Idiocracy. Also I laughed because otherwise the fear takes over.
- tzs 2y ago"Doe" is actually a real surname, with a few thousand of them in the US. I'd guess that there probably have been people actually named "Jane Doe". I wonder if that causes many problems for them?
- hackernewds 2y agowhat sorts of problems do you imagine this causing?
- tzs 2y agoThe name is widely used as a placeholder. Here's how Wikipedia describes it [1]: > John Doe (male) and Jane Doe (female) are multiple-use placeholder names that are used in the British and US-American legal system and aside generally in the United Kingdom and the United States when the true name of a person is unknown or is being intentionally concealed. I'd imagine that could lead to some difficulties when someone really named Jane Doe has to deal with some system that uses that name as a placeholder. Similar to the way people whose surname is Null sometimes run into problems because of poorly written computer systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe
- hyperific 2y agoWhat's striking to me is that the parents sued. RNH passed off AI-generated text as their own when they knew how to cite AI generated works and were versed in academic integrity. It wouldn't occur to me to sue the school if this was my kid.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> What's striking to me is that the parents sued And the kid was even offered a redo! On the other hand, the school caved on National Honor Society after the parents filed. So maybe the best move would have been (tactically, not as a parent) to show the school the draft complaint but never file it.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThey're not optimizing for the kid's education. They optimizing for the credentials the kid is able to get. Filing the lawsuit is an asymmetric bet: - win, and increase college admissions odds - lose, and be no worse off that without the suit
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> lose, and be no worse off that without the suit This kid should change his name, given his initials, high school and parents’ names are public record next to a four brain cell cheating attempt.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoDo you think college admissions officers follow the news and use what they learn to maintain a naughty list? Perhaps a business idea?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Do you think college admissions officers follow the news and use what they learn to maintain a naughty list? College admissions, no. College students and colleagues and employers, being able to use a search engine, absolutely.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoDiscussed before the ruling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41861818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41861818
- nkrisc 2y ago> The parents' case hangs largely on the student handbook's lack of a specific statement about AI, even though that same handbook bans unauthorized use of technology. "They told us our son cheated on a paper, which is not what happened," Jennifer Harris told WCVB last month. "They basically punished him for a rule that doesn't exist." I'm going out on a limb here, but if this is the viewpoint of the people who raised him, then I'm not surprised he cheated. If this was my son and the facts were the same, he'd be grounded in addition to whatever consequence the school deems fit.
- ChrisRR 2y agoIt's such a stupid argument. That because the handbook didn't list the specific method of cheating it was therefore allowed. How about just don't cheat?
- jancsika 2y agoWhat's the relevance? Are you going to embark on a "Let's Educate The Users" mission for parenting?
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoIt would be futile. Parents and children are now united in not wanting to be educated.
- djaouen 2y agoSAD!
- slowmovintarget 2y agoThis has got to be specific to the US, yes? None of my overseas colleagues have this attitude toward education, and my wife (now an American, but an immigrant) certainly doesn't.
- hn_version_0023 2y ago
- csa 2y agoThe parents seem absolutely unhinged. Poor kid.
- xyst 2y agoYet another “affluenza” raised child joining the ranks of society. Probably will become a future C-level exec at an American company.
- andai 2y agoThe student was not punished for "using AI", but for plagiarism: >The incident occurred in December 2023 when RNH was a junior. The school determined that RNH and another student "had cheated on an AP US History project by attempting to pass off, as their own work, material that they had taken from a generative artificial intelligence ('AI') application," Levenson wrote. "Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations)."
- kotaKat 2y agoAnd for AP US History... a college level course. Yikes.
- hackernewds 2y agoso they were caught due to the citations to non-existing books. it seems fine and unconnected to all of the controversial news stories of using AI detection, which has a high rate of false positives
- rOOb85 2y agoThe teacher noticed a few irregularities such as the time the student spent inside the submitted project. The cheater student only had around 55 mins logged whereas everyone else had 7-8 hours. That set off alarm bells for the teacher who then actually looked into the paper more and noticed fake citations and it was flagged as “ai” generated when they ran it through a few ai detectors.
- eli_gottlieb 2y agoGood. Insofar as the point of a school paper is to make the student do the thinking and writing, taking it from ChatGPT is plagiarizing from OpenAI.
- fargle 2y agowell, plagiarizing from whoever OpenAI plagiarized it from...
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoI just used chatGPT to code an html/css/JavaScript solution in an hour for coworkers who were having troubles. There were like wow that was fast we were trying to figure this out for a few days. I'm skilled / an expert but that would've taken me many hours vs. a few back n forth with GPT. Overall my html/css/javascript skills I feel now aren't as valuable as they were. I guess in this instance I cheated too or is it that my developer peers haven't gotten into using GPT or they are more moral? As well maybe this is just the new normal....
- fifilura 2y agoThe rules for working are very very different from being at school. No you were not cheating, you did what was expected from you. But you knew that.
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoHow so and or AI is changing the rules everywhere no? Today it seems not good yet tomorrow it's how things are...
- fifilura 2y agoThe goals are very different. It was like this also before AI. The goal in school is to learn things. To learn to write you can't just copy an article from a paper and say it is yours. You have not learned. At work, the goal is to get things done.
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoIn our field you needed / need to learn new things to stay relevant yet now the new thing does it almost all for you. As well if one generation is using AI to get things done why wouldn't a younger generation do the same? Do as I say and not as I do.. that never has held well over time.
- 2y ago
- xyst 2y agoProbably unpopular opinion here but families, usually wealthy, that use the legal system like this to avoid consequences are parasites. It reveals not only your poor job of raising your children. But also the poor character of the parents. Glad the courts didn’t grant a similar “affluenza” ruling here. The student plagiarized, short and simple.
- alok-g 2y ago+1. The article hints at a worry about college applications by the student. So perhaps this was an attempt to clean the student's slate of the cheating record. Still, I can't support the approach taken.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoAgreed. Ironically it’s parents such as these who are the most loudly self-proclaimed staunch supporters of meritocracy, except when it comes to their children who are somehow not subject to it at all.
- griffzhowl 2y agoI think the only unpopular part of that is that you'd think it's an unpopular opinion
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt depends on the audience. On HN, it's probably a popular opinion. Among typical American parents these days, it's probably not.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> Probably unpopular opinion here but families, usually wealthy, that use the legal system like this to avoid consequences are parasites 100% agree. Plus it diverts school resources -- in other words, taxpayer money -- to fight the court case, meaning they have less to spend on educating children which is what taxpayer's are funding. The parents should be on the hook for the school's legal fees.
- hinkley 2y agoHow do you get students to engage in creative writing assignments in age of AI? How do you get them to dive into a subject and actually learn about it?
- wavemode 2y agoThe same way you did so before LLMs existed - you rely on in-class assignments, or take-home assignments that can't be gamed. Giving out purely take-home writing assignments with no in-class component (in an age where LLMs exist), is akin to giving out math assignments without a requirement to show your work (in an age where calculators exist). Many years before LLMs were ever a thing, I recall being required to complete (and turn in) a lot of our research and outlining in class. A plain "go home and write about X topic" was not that common, out of fear of plagiarism.
- ajot 2y agoI'm thirty something. How did my teachers engage me in doing math? How did they engage me in rote-memorizing the multiplication tables when portable calculators were already a thing, being operated by coin-cells or little solar panels? Part of teaching is getting kids to learn why and how things are done, even if they can be done better/faster/cheaper with new technology or large scale industrial facilities. It's not easy, but I think it's the most important part of education: getting kids to understand the subjacent abstract ideas behind what they're doing, and learning that there's value in that understanding. Don't really want to dichotomize, but every other way kids will just become non-curious users of magic black boxes (with black boxes being computers, societal systems, buildings, infrastructure, supply chains, etc).
- dv_dt 2y agoInvert the assignment, provide a prompt to supply to an essay writing AI of the students choice, but the assignment is to provide critique for the veracity and effectiveness of the generated essay
- insane_dreamer 2y agoSure, use AI for research, just like using the Internet for research. But don't copy/paste AI generated content in the same way that you don't copy/paste a chapter from a book and pass it off as your own.
- m3kw9 2y agoAI is the new calc
- zzo38computer 2y agoIt would seem that what was put into the report is clearly wrong (in this case from generative AI, but regardless of where it came from, it would still be wrong), so it is still legitimate to mark those parts as wrong. There are other things too which can be called wrong, whether or not the use of this generative AI is permitted (and it probably makes sense to not permit it in the way that it was used in this instance), so there are many reasons why it should be marked wrong. However, if the punishment is excessively severe, then the punishment would be wrong.
- geor9e 2y agoHe didn't get detention for hallucinating facts. He got detention for plagiarizing hallucinations without attribution.
- egberts1 2y agoThis would have been illegal in Italy has their 1970 Worker Protection against automated management would kill this AI.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jazzysnake 2y agoI am not a lawyer but the student's defense is akin to "Ain't no rules says a dog can't play basketball" from airbud. There are clear rules against plagiarism, and the student copied stuff verbatim from an online source without any citations.
- tonetheman 2y ago[dead]
- perihelions 2y agoHow on earth do you get caught plagiarizing and still pass with a C+?
- sokoloff 2y agoPresumably, this one assignment wasn't the entire grade and the C+ was for the entire course.
- gurchik 2y ago> he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment The student still received a passing grade for the assignment despite some of the assignment being AI hallucinated text. From my experience, plagiarism is an automatic zero for the entire assignment or course, but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process.
- perihelions 2y ago- "but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process" That's a good point: in this particular case, the teacher of the course was subpoenaed to federal court and compelled to testify about their grading. Incredible burden, for someone else's problem.
- asimovfan 2y agoalso disciplinary action and very probable expulsion
- zdragnar 2y agoAt a university that takes their rules seriously, perhaps. Absolutely not expulsion at any k-12 school.
- wccrawford 2y agoLast I checked, 65 was a D-, not a C+. So the C+ was for the course.
- paxys 2y agoWhat's sad is that the school district spending its limited money to fight frivolous lawsuits like these directly impacts all other students who are just trying to get a good education. Stuff like this won't stop unless the helicopter parents are made to pay the school's legal bills.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoSadly, the parents could still win. What a precedent that would be. Though I'm not sure there's any avoiding a future with mass societal atrophy of reading and writing skills.
- DavidWoof 2y agoIn the midst of the perennial "woe the kids today" rant, it's worth considering that this generation is the first generation in the 300,000 year history of homo sapiens sapiens to widely utilize reading and writing as a primary means of daily communication. Ob XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://xkcd.com/1414/
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoYes, they'll be able grasp the beauty of Les Misérables or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire so long as it is fed to them as a stream of <280 character tweets, dohohoho. Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believe their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes and emoji are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.
- ben_w 2y agoGiven the comic is an echo of conversations like this, I think perhaps that if he is guilty of that then so too are you and I and all others here. Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that. Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length. But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoBack when I was in high school CD-ROMs were brand new and you could buy encyclopedias on disc. I made dozens of dollars selling book reports and history papers to my fellow honors class peers. Every paper was a virtually unaltered copy & paste job from Microsoft Encarta. Copy, paste into word, format using some “fancy font”, add my “customers” name, date and class to the top… print! Boom. Somebody buys me lunch. I mean how else was I gonna have time to write shitty Visual Basic programs that used every custom control I could download in order to play/pause the CDROM’s music stuff?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoA microcosm of society. Helping others cheat for profit.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoNothing modern whatsoever about it. Students at Oxford nearly two thousand years ago sold their talents to other students.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ninalanyon 2y agoAlmost one not two millennia.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoLets see - 1096 to today is ... you're right. Obviously I didn't go to Oxford, not in maths anyway.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoIt was high school.
- skywhopper 2y agoWhile the parents assert the C+ might keep their kid out of Stanford, the more likely impact is that being known for a nationally notorious lawsuit over a minor infraction is what will keep him out of Stanford.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoAlso, he's not getting into Stanford with the B grade that the parents are suing for anyway. You can't even get into Stanford with all A's these days.
- csa 2y ago> Also, he's not getting into Stanford with the B grade that the parents are suing for anyway. You can't even get into Stanford with all A's these days. None of this is true. Grades are just one part of the picture. The folks who think a B is what kept them out of an elite school are just engaging in wishful thinking. The number of people who get into elite schools like Harvard or Stanford with multiple Bs would surprise you.
- Workaccount2 2y ago[flagged]
- csa 2y ago> I wanna see how many Asian men get in with B's Please stop perpetuating this myth. Asians are not held to a different standard. Anecdotally (with truck load of anecdotes), Asian-Americans (to be specific) frequently seem to be held to a widely-known standard that either they aren’t aware of or don’t believe in. Note that this is not exclusive to Asian-Americans — plenty of upper-middle class white people fall into this category as well — but that was the group you mentioned. I have made an open offer to HN, and it still holds: If you show me the application of an Asian that you felt was held to a different standard for elite school admissions, then I will give you the reason why they most likely didn’t get in.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> the Harris’s lawsuit against the Hingham school committee remains alive what does this mean if the judge already ruled in the school's favor? parents will appeal?
- alistairSH 2y agoThe parents asked for a preliminary injunction to remove the cheating from the kids record. A judge could do this prior to trial if he believes the suit likely to succeed. The judge refused the injunction because he believes the school district was likely acting in good faith and did nothing illegal.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoOh, I see, so the case is still going to court. What a waste of taxpayer money. Elon wants to cut government waste? Make it more difficult to sue by setting a higher bar by which your suit can even be accepted.
- alistairSH 2y agoYep, case is still alive. This just indicates the judge doesn’t see it as a slam dunk for the parents/cheater.
- daft_pink 2y agoCiting nonexistent sources should lower your grade whether you used ai or not.
- trhway 2y agoUsing AI in school today is heresy, yet give it a few years and "yesterday's heresy is today's canon".
- trod1234 2y agoAfter reading this article, it is hard to say who is in the right here. The court could easily be wrong because they can only judge based on the facts at hand, based on presumptions they've already settled on. On one hand, the school referenced academic honesty policy in their defense, but there are no international standards for referencing AI, many AI detection measures have false positives, and they both disallow and allow the same behavior seemingly based upon the teacher's discretion. If you were a malign individual in a position of authority (i.e. the classic teacher being out to get a troublemaker), you could easily set up circumstances that are unprovable under these guidelines. There is also a vested interest in academia to not create a hostile work environment, where there is no duty to investigate. They are all in it together. This has been an ongoing problem for academia for decades. There were also several very prejudicial aspects referenced, such as the revision changes, but some people write their stuff out in paper first, and then copy what's written into a document from there. This is proof of nothing because its apples to oranges. Finally, there are grievances made about lack of due process, and other arbitrary matters which are all too common in academia, but academia makes it very difficult to be caught in such matters short of recording every little thing, which may potentially be against the states laws. For example, you may be given written instructions for an assignment that are unclear, and ask for clarification, and the teacher may say something contradictory. Should students be held accountable for a teacher lying verbally (if it happened)? It is sad that it had to come down to court, but that is just how academia operates with free money from the government. They don't operate under a standard business loss function, nor do they get rid of teachers who don't perform once they reach permanent faculty status. The documentary waiting for superman really drives this home, and its only gotten worse since that documentary came out. There are plenty of people in the comments who are just rabid against the parents, and that's largely caused by poor journalism seeking to rile people up into irrational fanatic fervor. These people didn't look at the details, they just hopped on the bandwagon. Be rational, and realize that academia has been broken for decades, and what you read isn't necessarily the whole truth of the matter. The parents had several valid points which went ignored because there is no smoking gun, and that is how corruption works in centralized systems, and indicates a rule by law rather than a rule of law.