GREAT MOMENTS IN 21st CENTURY PARENTING: Massachusetts parents sue school district over student receiving ‘D’ after using AI for social studies project.
The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a “D” grade.
“He’s been accused of cheating, and it wasn’t cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI,” Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts’ Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News.
The lawsuit alleges that their son will “suffer irreparable harm that is imminent” over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier colleges.
“So, our argument to the school was could you fail him with a 59 instead of a 53 so he can have a B minus? He’s applying to top tier schools,” Harris told the news station. “He’s applying to Stanford, he’s applying to MIT. They see a ‘C’ [grade] and it’s going in the trash.”
Harris said that the school “basically punished him for a rule that doesn’t exist,” saying that the school’s code of conduct handbook never mentioned the use of AI in projects until their son was punished, WCVB-TV reported.
She added that her son argued “it’s well documented that AI is the property of the person who generated it,” WBZ-TV reported.
While the school called it plagiarism, the parents and their lawyer disagree.
“There’s a wide gulf of information out there that says AI isn’t plagiarism,” Peter Farrell, who is representing the family, told WCVB.
Your son isn’t the future Capt. Kirk besting the Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy. There may not be a rule in the handbook against using AI now, but there’s certain to be one very soon. And arguing that “AI is the property of the person who generated it,” is a reminder that it’s also the property of all of the Webpages AI trolls to generate its responses, instead somebody studying those pages himself to learn something. And while a lawyer can make the technical case that AI isn’t plagiarism, it’s an awfully lazy way to get around actually doing what in less enlightened times was once called “hitting the books.”
But as AI does to text what the pocket calculator did to math, look for more and more of reports of students relying on it to attempt to skate through doing their homework: How do teachers detect AI-generated work?