Rayonna Freeman
palmettoreport@gmail.com

(Rock Hill, S.C.) — The use of artificial intelligence on college campuses is raising questions and concerns among students and faculty, as some worry AI tools could be used for cheating.

“It’s easy for me to identify pretty quickly when a student is plagiarizing, because I get so familiar with their voice in a creative writing class, they’re turning in writing all semester long,” said Dustin Hoffman, a professor of English and the director of graduate studies.

With services like ChatGPT and Open AI, students have access to tools that could be misused, but some say artificial intelligence is useful for creating ideas for schoolwork.

“I don’t use it as like a way to just get answers for an assignment. I almost use it like a Google search, so I’ll type in the questions being asked and then I’ll see what it gives me and then I kind of use that to build either a foundation for my ideas,” said Dylan Hodge, a senior sports management major.

The usage of AI on campus has caught the attention of university officials, who are working to create policies to deal with these new challenges.

Amber Slack, associate vice president of student affairs and the dean of students, said there has been a spike in academic misconduct cases relating to artificial intelligence.

“One of the cases that I had last spring, a student…took her paper, put it into ChatGPT and it changed a lot of the wording to words that were not appropriate for the context of her paper. So it flagged it to the professor, this is not the phrasing that we use in this particular culture,” Slack said.

She said she has attended workshops that teach people about AI and she thinks students and faculty would benefit from that training.

“I’ve also seen and gone to some different workshops where faculty are talking about ways to help students understand the benefits and the challenges with using artificial intelligence,” Slack said.