When Professor Smith announced their newest essay assignment on “The Impact of Wearable Technology on Athletic Performance and Injury Prevention”, Amanda knew it was going to be a challenge to finish it on time along with her other responsibilities. Rather than spending hours on researching and creating an essay outline, Amanda thought she could use AI programs like ChatGPT and Bing AI to aid her in the process. With ChatGPT, users can receive assistance in creative brainstorming, generating ideas, creating concepts, and so much more that humans would be unable to do in such a short period of time. Bing AI, on the other hand, is useful when trying to find reputable sources for essays depending on the topic users are looking for. By using both of these, Amanda is able to save time and generate more intelligent ideas to work with regarding her essay. 

Between practice and work, Amanda only had a combined couple of hours to work on the assignment. With the help of AI, Amanda was able to create an outline for her essay with some suggestions on primary sources within minutes because artificial intelligence tends to outshine humans in predefined tasks on which it has been trained (Bhandarkar, n.d.). This plays into Moravec’s Paradox that states humans are better at tasks AI struggles with and vice versa (Korteling et al., p. 6). Through using AI, Amanda was able to work efficiently and increase her productivity in places she exceeds in such as the creativity aspect. Similar to the thoughts of author Charlie Warzel (2023), it is expected that generative AI will become the overlay for creative work, busywork, research, outlining, etc (para. 2). 

The fear Professor Smith has about students using AI as a crutch is understandable, but it ignores the truths about artificial and human intelligence. He regards the use of AI as cheating because he assumes the programs are doing the majority of the work while the user is not contributing. However, this view is inaccurate because students could not make use of AI if they were unable to create the proper prompts to facilitate a useful answer from the program. Another excerpt from Warzel discusses what he calls the most important job skill of this century referring to AI prompt-writing skills that engineers have been refining to produce applicable outputs within seconds through knowledge of the topic at hand (para. 7). This implies that Amanda was not using AI as a crutch, but rather organizing and directing her knowledge through the aid of these programs to hasten the writing process of the assignment. 

Once Amanda had finished the essay, she ran it through another AI program called Grammarly which is a literature aid that scans writing excerpts and makes suggestions based on the type of essay it is given. This way, she is able to see suggestions about different words and punctuation that could enhance the essay, but ultimately choose how she wants it to flow. As the due date neared, Amanda read through her essay one last time and then turned it into Professor Smith to be graded. 

While going through the turned in assignments, Professor Smith put each one through an AI detector. When Amanda’s work was flagged, Professor Smith promptly emailed her about discussing her academic misconduct. His first thought after seeing the results was that she must have cheated since there was a form of AI detected. His uninformed beliefs would not allow him to consider the fact that Amanda may have used AI as a tool. Contrary to popular beliefs, AI is inferior to even human children when it comes to reason and creativity (Gopnik 2022). Since machine intelligence cannot pull from past lived experiences, all of its “knowledge” must be programmed from a database by humans. This being said, the percentage of AI detected in Amanda’s work would have been significantly more if she had not used her own thoughts and creativity along with the outline ChatGPT provided. 

The next day, Amanda found herself in Professor Smith’s office with an accusation of academic misconduct. As Professor Smith is expressing his disappointment, Amanda thinks of a plan to show him that she had not cheated but rather used her resources as an aid. She asks if there is a way for her to appeal this claim of academic misconduct and Professor Smith mentions the Office of Student Conduct and the Academic Judiciary Committee. After doing some research, Amanda reaches out to these resources and schedules a hearing where she can explain how AI can be used as a tool to both the committee and Professor Smith. 

As the day of the hearing neared, Amanda prepared a presentation of how she used AI programs as well as some research that backs up her claims of AI being a useful aid in human productivity. When she walked into the room, she saw 4 committee members sitting at the end of a long table joined by Professor Smith. The hearing commenced and Professor Smith explained why he accused her of cheating and the evidence that led him to this conclusion. Once the committee had heard his side, they gave Amanda the floor to combat the accusation. 

To begin, Amanda explained which AI programs she used and how she used them on her assignment. The committee recognized that she did not have any of the programs write her paper so it was not necessarily cheating, but Professor Smith pushed that his syllabus clearly states there should be no use of AI in his course. The committee agreed with this argument, but Amanda believed she could change his mind if they would allow her to continue. Once approved, Amanda began discussing how AI systems are “cultural technologies” like writing print, libraries, internet search engines, or even language because they summarize and “crowd-source” knowledge rather than create it (Gopnik 2022, p. 5). This implied that when she used ChatGPT and Bing AI it was truly to gather information and organize it so it was readily available when she began writing. The committee found this somewhat convincing, however, Professor Smith did not buy into this point. 

Amanda’s next angle was AI’s inability to generalize new examples, especially if they are very different from the ones that program was trained on (Gopnik 2022, p. 3). She then explained how, in line with the previous point, AI programs can only provide crowd-sourced information based on its programmed database so it needs a human element in order to facilitate creativity and follow the proper guidelines of an assignment. Amanda then tied this into her own situation where she took advantage of an AI program's ability to crowd-source and organize the correct information to then be used by her to write a well-informed essay. With this concept, something in Professor Smith’s mind changed and he saw what Amanda’s intentions were when using AI. 

Never in his years of academia had Professor Smith considered a new and innovative way of finding sources because there was never something like it readily available to him. He was not fully convinced that it was not a crutch, but he understood that students and universities must also innovate along with new technology in order to develop. Amanda ended her defense with the idea that AI applications will be used to complement and compensate for the inherent biological and cognitive constraints of humans as they progress in the future (Korteling et al. 2021, p. 9). This alludes to the inability of humans to scan through enormous amounts of data and research within seconds to find reputable sources unlike newly developed machine intelligence such as AI. The committee and Professor Smith agreed with this claim and eventually came to the conclusion that Amanda had not cheated and would only receive a point deduction for going against the syllabus protocol. 

The next semester, Professor Smith took the ruling of zero AI use in his course off the syllabus and instead implemented some guidelines on acceptable uses of AI programs. When students came to him with questions on this change, he decided to hold a week-long lesson on the benefits and increased productivity of using AI properly in each of his courses. This led to an enormous change in not only the quality of the work he was receiving, but also in the attitudes and morale of his students who had new found free time for other classes or hobbies.