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.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    14 days ago

    Bad parenting. Not only did they not talk to their kid about what constitutes honourable academic conduct, not only did they not talk to their kid about the pitfalls of using generative AI, especially in an academic context, they are now teaching their brat that the proper response to fucking up is to blame the rules, to blame the school, to blame other people. Bad parents.

    I wonder, have these people no shame?

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      14 days ago

      Having worked with parents like this before: No. None at all. They’d rather throw thousands of dollars at different attorneys hoping one of them will take the case to teach their children to never have shame.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      14 days ago

      Should kids use chatgpt to do their assignments, probably not. I think everyone here is looking at this in the wrong way though. If they rules did not state he could not use it, a proper response to me would be to tell the kid to do the project over without using chatgpt on another topic, and update the rules. Instead they did the school equivalent of arresting the student and detaining him (detention), and marked the assignment poorly which impacts his future.

      The kid should not have done this.
      The school/teacher also should not have done this.

      According to the information we have, no rules were broken, so it was an unwarranted punishment.

      On a side note your comment is also very “fall in line” thinking. One could argue the parents are standing up for their kid and teaching him how to stand up for himself.

      The authorities need to follow written laws and procedures. Otherwise we are just punishing people for being different.

      Everyone should be mad at the school because we are having to use taxes to address a situation that a teacher could have addressed long before by just telling the student to do the assignment over.

      • RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        14 days ago

        Bullshit. Every academic honesty policy I’ve seen says, in short, to do your own work, including this school’s:

        Hingham Public Schools, however, claims that its student handbook prohibited the use of “unauthorized technology” and “unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own work.”

        If the student tries to pass off AI writing as his own, it definitely falls under that second clause. Does it really need an exhaustive list of all the places/people/technologies to not copy from?

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          14 days ago

          How, you can ask the ai for where it sourced the info, and what books to acquire. You just used AI, and can use whatever citation method the teacher asks for. If you mean for the AI to write the essay, I would say it is plagiarism, but to use AI is no different than using a search engine to find sources.

          Shit, you could use the AI to tell you how to properly write your citations in the form requested by the teacher as well.

          • Hoimo@ani.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            13 days ago

            you can ask the ai for where it sourced the info, and what books to acquire.

            I don’t know which LLM you’re using, but I haven’t seen any that disclose that information. And if you ask the probable word generator, you’ll just get probable words back, no guarantee that they’re real sources.