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.

  • Don_alForno
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    1 month ago

    I’m pretty sure there will be a passage about plagiarism in the handbook too.

    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      Obviously, that only concerns copying human work, not copying AI generated work. The art of parroting other people’s work is to creatively rephrase it, right? You don’t have to actually comprehend the concepts if you’re good enough at reciting them.

      That’s a joke, using irony to comment on a skewed understanding of academia and people trying to skirt the point to get ahead with less effort.