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The AI Cheating Crisis: Education Needs Its Anti-Doping Movement


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THE AI CHEATING CRISIS: EDUCATION NEEDS ITS ANTI-DOPING MOVEMENT

Three reasons to reject ‘AI doping’ as the new normal
By Noor Akbari — February 28, 2024 5 min read
DigitalVision Vectors + Getty Images + Education Week
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Noor Akbari
Noor Akbari is a co-founder and the CEO of Rosalyn.ai, an AI proctoring
technology company.

Since launching in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a generative artificial
intelligence, has been compared to “steroids” numerous times. “ChatGPT is like
steroids for your skills,” says one Reddit user. It’s “Google on steroids,”
claims a journalism professor. AI will be like Photoshop but “on steroids,”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a U.S. Senate subcommittee last year.

Perhaps “steroids” is the right term. Like steroids in sports, generative AI
could create a global cheating crisis that undermines the purpose and value of
an education.

International sporting had its ChatGPT moment in 1998 when French customs agents
found narcotics, testosterone, amphetamines, growth hormones, and syringes
inside the car of Willy Voet, the caretaker of the Festina cycling team, on his
way to the Tour de France. Further investigation revealed that the entire
Festina team took banned substances in coordination with their management and
doctors. All three medalists in the 1998 Tour de France were later found to have
been doping.


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Subsequent doping scandals in Major League Baseball and other major athletic
leagues further tarnished the reputation of sports as a fair and meritocratic
institution.

The rise of “AI doping” is strikingly similar. In a Study.com survey of 1,000
college-age students, 89 percent of respondents admitted to using ChatGPT to
complete a homework assignment. Another 48 percent admitted to using it on
at-home tests or quizzes, and 53 percent had the bot write an essay. Yet, 72
percent of the students reported believing ChatGPT should be banned from campus
networks.

Are they hypocrites? No. When enough players in a competitive game can cheat
with a high upside and low risk of consequences, other players will feel forced
to cheat as well. As Lance Armstrong told the French newspaper Le Monde in 2013,
several months after publicly admitting he had used performance-enhancing drugs,
it was “impossible to win the Tour de France without doping.”

If enough students improve their grades using ChatGPT, their peers may conclude
that it’s “impossible” to compete unless they cheat, too. In cycling, not doping
meant losing competition winnings and sponsorships. In education, not using
generative AI could mean losing out on college admissions, scholarships, and
career opportunities.

At the height of the sports doping crisis, a common argument was to let doping
happen. If no substance is banned, isn’t the playing field level? The
counterargument is that substances are banned because they pose a health risk to
athletes. If sporting organizations not only allowed but tacitly encouraged
athletes to dope, the resulting biochemical arms race would have a sure loser:
athletes and their well-being.

Likewise, the normalization of AI doping would create an arms race among
students, resulting in several consequences for them and society:





1. Unchecked use of AI renders education pointless. We fund public education as
a common good because it empowers citizens to live fulfilling lives and
contribute to their communities. If the point of education is merely to get a
diploma, then who cares if a student or AI does the work? The true point of an
education, however, is to train a person’s mind and character.
Claiming that students no longer need to learn skills like writing—because AI
does it—is like arguing that no one should strength train because carts and
forklifts move heavy stuff for us. This conflates means and ends. People lift
weights for the inherent benefits to their mind and body. Likewise, we learn to
write for the inherent benefits to our cognition and communication skills.

2. AI threatens to undermine academic integrity, the foundation for professional
credibility. We trust our surgeon, certified public accountant, or lawyer
because we trust the institutions that test, certify, and employ them.
Well, researchers have found that ChatGPT can pass the U.S. medical licensing
exam, CPA exam, and bar exam. You might argue that cheating on those exams is
almost impossible. But what about an online nursing exam, an online
certification in cybersecurity, or an online degree in social work? A person who
cheats for the credential in those cases could become a danger to others.

3. The struggle to maintain academic credibility could produce a two-tiered
education system that is even more inequitable than the current one. Elite
colleges with full-time professors and graduate students have the resources to
design assignments in which AI provides no edge. Community colleges and online
education platforms don’t have that luxury. A class with hundreds of students
and one part-time instructor cannot convert every digital test into an original
research project or in-person test with pencils and paper—not without raising
costs considerably.
Efforts to democratize education will be laughable if the only credible degrees
come from private, in-person institutions that cost students an average of
almost $56,000 per year.

K-12 schools will experience similar inequities, particularly between expensive
private schools and crowded public schools. Schools with lower student-teacher
ratios are better positioned to design assignments that limit students’ reliance
on AI than schools with more limited staff and resources.

So how do we address AI’s threat to academic integrity and an affordable
education?

Forget watermarking AI-generated text and AI detectors—they’re easily duped. And
forget academic “honor codes.” In my birth country of Afghanistan, the strict
honor codes of Islam that forbid corruption didn’t stop the country from
becoming an epicenter of corruption after the United States’ 2001 occupation
injected billions of dollars. Like Lance Armstrong, no one struggled to justify
corrupt behavior when everyone else was doing it, too.

Exams, whether in person or online, must be proctored such that no one can cheat
using AI. That said, to prepare students for the working world, schools should
teach generative AI in classrooms using versions with limited capabilities.





The silver lining of the 1998 Tour de France was that the International Olympic
Committee formed the World Anti-Doping Agency the following year. Though far
from perfect, WADA created a unified list of banned substances and standards for
detecting them. In other words, the organization defined what “doping” means in
sports. Soon enough, education systems may need a WADA-like organization to
define cheating in the AI age and set standards for preventing and detecting it.

Doping in sports undermined the fairness and meritocracy of a beloved
institution, until that institution took the threat seriously. It’s time we take
AI doping in schools seriously.

Related Tags:
Artificial Intelligence Cheating

A version of this article appeared in the March 13, 2024 edition of Education
Week as Education Needs Its Anti-Doping Movement


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