University Suspends Students for AI Tool It Gave Them $10k Prize to Make

https://www.404media.co/university-suspends-students-for-ai-homework-tool-it-paid-them-10-000-to-make/

by danso • 2 years ago

68 43 2 years ago

VWWHFSfQ• 2 years ago

Am I understanding that they trained their model on the real course materials, including specific assignments, exercises, and even the actual tests, without the institution's permission?

I don't see a problem with rescinding the prize and punishing the kids for dishonesty.

It's not a free-for-all no matter how much OpenAI wants it to be.

wccrawford• 2 years ago

Yeah, it sounds like they were upfront about connecting it to the system in the original competition, but never actually received permission to do so after that. They just assumed they had permission.

The "it can be used to cheat" thing is just dumb and is totally on the university for selecting them in the first place if that was a problem.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

They just assumed they had permission.

Being given money by the system's owner to do it does sound a bit like permission to me...

abtinf• 2 years ago

To which “dishonesty” do you refer?

8338550bff962• 2 years ago

The dishonesty of building exactly what you said you would build and being forthright about how you accomplished it such that a technicality of how you accessed the data gets you suspended.

loeg9• 2 years ago

The article quotes them as planning to train their model on course materials automatically. But it is not clear if that actually happened. Individual students were always free to upload course materials.

I'm not sure what is dishonest about that.

Edit: I'm not sure if the article has been updated from when I first skimmed it, or I just missed it, but this seems directly addressed now:

The students were also accused of “disseminating course material” by allowing students to use their own, individualized Canvas API tokens to connect Eightball directly so they did not have to upload PDFs to the tool themselves. “The upgrade did not change what students could upload to Eightball or what learning materials Eightball could produce upon request,” the suspended students’ lawyers note in the lawsuit.

8338550bff962• 2 years ago

It is not really clear to me if it had privileged access to answers or if it saw the same material a student would see reading through the syllabus + assigned readings.

doix• 2 years ago

It's the latter. It sounds like they got suspended because they told their users (i.e students) to give them their canvas API tokens so that they could fetch course materials on their behalf.

Previously, students had to download the PDFs and manually upload them. If students gave eightball their API tokens, eightball could fetch their course materials on their behalf.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's how it reads to me.

loeg9• 2 years ago

I think it is pretty clear they did not have privileged access. Either because they never connected to the courseware service, or because they did so with students' credentials.

Edit: I'm not sure if I just missed it earlier or the article has been updated, but this issue is directly addressed now:

The students were also accused of “disseminating course material” by allowing students to use their own, individualized Canvas API tokens to connect Eightball directly so they did not have to upload PDFs to the tool themselves. “The upgrade did not change what students could upload to Eightball or what learning materials Eightball could produce upon request,” the suspended students’ lawyers note in the lawsuit.

edwinjm• 2 years ago

Student could upload their own material, which I think is fine as long as you use it personally. The intention was to connect to the school system with all course materials, but that never took place.

burkaman• 2 years ago

No, I don't think you're understanding correctly. The students first pitched an idea explicitly based on users uploading "specific assignments, exercises, and even the actual tests" to their tool, and the institution approved this idea and gave them $10,000 to build it.

The change that prompted the suspension seems to be about the technical details of how users upload those files - using the Canvas API instead of manually downloading and uploading. Either way, there is no dishonesty alleged by anyone, even the school Honor Council.

Also, the tool did not use OpenAI or any other third-party AI service, so whatever opinions you have about OpenAI are not relevant.

educasean2• 2 years ago

There's been a myria news regarding AI-related incidents in the academic settings. One constant in most of these stories appear to be that most educators have no interest in educating themselves about AI.

loeg9• 2 years ago

What bearing does this have on the article?

educasean2• 2 years ago

My comment was directly influenced by the article.

azhenley• 2 years ago

There’s still hope! We recently published a paper where we interviewed instructors about their concerns of AI tools in the classroom and then we deployed one.

See here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/codeaid.html

slg• 2 years ago

In each of these instances, it is becoming clear that schools do not know what the rules about AI should be and that they are often being made up on the fly.

This seems a little uncharitable to me considering society has no idea what the rules around AI should be and is therefore making them on the fly too. Why do we expected school administrators to be so far in front of everyone else on these issues?

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

Universities and the professors there, often act as judge, jury and executioner on their fiefdoms. It's not like most students are wealthy enough to afford to sue the university for failing to objectively apply the rules they themselves set.

dcow3• 2 years ago

This student was, from TFA.

Arnt• 2 years ago

Each of us should be consistent in our actions and charitable in our interpretations, even if society at large is chaotic, inconsistent and sometimes quick to judge harshly.

That applies to universities as much as to your employer and to me personally.

chongli• 2 years ago

University/college administrators are deeply terrified about AI. They are fully aware of the exclusive role that respected institutions play as gatekeepers of accreditation. They know that the entire value of a diploma or degree from their school is completely founded upon the public perception of its legitimacy. AI threatens to totally erase that legitimacy by making it trivial for anyone to cheat on their assignments, thus preventing the school from properly assessing student learning.

Some of this danger can be mitigated by switching assessment exclusively over to in-person, proctored, closed book exams. However, this does not work for many courses in the humanities that are intended to teach critical academic writing. A 3 hour closed book exam is totally inadequate for assessing the student's ability to conduct research and write a long, critical essay. Similar issues exist for many other fields, particularly as you go deeper into specialization in a field where an examination covering basic facts and skills cannot suffice.

mathgradthrow• 2 years ago

If you can receive a passing mark for AI generated content, that's principally an indictment of the evaluator.

dcow3• 2 years ago

Sure, but that’s not what was happening.

kcsavvy• 2 years ago

Users should have access to their own data. Whether it’s a university coursework app or anything else.

These students should be applauded. They are making studying easier. How are universities, of all places, so inept at making basic common sense decisions?

croes2• 2 years ago

It was connected to a platform which hosted course reading material.

That's not the students data.

loeg9• 2 years ago

The students were intended to have access to the course data. They did not exceed their authorized access.

deckar01• 2 years ago

You can get a tutor to check your homework and highlight your errors. Sometimes they just tell you answers in the process of teaching. AI can be a tutor if that is what you ask for.

Homework is for using every tool at your disposal to learn. Tests are for proving you actually learned. Grading homework for credit and not giving feedback until after the test is a pattern I have seen too many times in higher ed, and it is a sorry excuse for education.

croes2• 2 years ago

How does Eightball.AI work?

Is it using OpenAI in the backend so OpenAI gets all the data for free?

loeg9• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/niWzb

University Suspends Students for AI Tool It Gave Them $10k Prize to Make

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