Was education ready for artificial intelligence? Over the past year, AI has rapidly integrated into the educational process, providing significant benefits and incredible risks.

Cheating on exams and homework, the tension between teachers and students, institutions’ reputation damage, and the search for tools to detect AI: this is an incomplete list of problems education faces with the development of AI writing. The question sparked the debate: is using AI to write essays illegal? It depends on several factors.

Is it illegal to use AI?

Passing off someone else’s work as your own is a serious offense. Increasingly, the essay or parts of it are generated by AI, but the student misquotes this third-party source. Most educational institutions consider this as plagiarism, and the consequences are just as severe. However, in general, using artificial intelligence is not illegal and can be very helpful in learning. It could be a sanctioned assignment that does not violate the principles of ethics but allows students to try all the advantages of modern technologies.

The consequences for violating academic integrity, whether through plagiarism or unauthorized use of AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and others, may differ depending on the specific policies of each educational institution. It also affects whether the student was caught for a violation for the first time and at what level. Whether it’s homework during the semester, a final essay, or an exam. Students may be suspended from classes or even expelled.

Is using AI unethical?

Institutions are updating their academic integrity policies to address ethical concerns. For example, when students rely solely on AI for assignments, such manipulations undermine the foundations of the educational process. This is because essays develop several important skills, including:

  • originality;
  • critical thinking;
  • writing skills;
  • and the ability to cite sources correctly.

Students’ understanding of the game’s rules and equal consequences for all ensures a favorable learning atmosphere and high academic success instead of tension.

Solution: AI Plagiarism checker for K-12

Educational tools such as PlagiarismCheck.org offer solutions for checking plagiarism, detecting ghostwriting, and catching traces of AI in texts. AI Plagiarism checker for K-12 has become a breakthrough in solving the cheating problem. In particular, the AI Detector feature can determine with 97% accuracy who wrote the text: AI or human. Complex algorithms allow us to provide reliable results. Teachers can get a convenient percentage report indicating the origin of each sentence in just a moment. 

So education is ready for artificial intelligence if people with effective means control the processes to ensure academic integrity.

Use AI to write: AI detection tools