Artificial intelligence tools have flooded the market recently. There are all kinds of ways you can use them, both in workplace situations and academia. If you’re attending school, though, you must be aware of issues related to academic integrity stemming from the use of AI. In particular, you need to know about existing plagiarism laws and how to navigate them.
You should know that getting online coursework assistance for college is also possible through more than one convenient service. Coursework assignment help that you get online can be quite useful if you’re struggling, since you can hire a professional. Googling phrases like “need help with coursework” or “coursework help” should get you pointed in the right direction. That’s one way you can bring courseworks to your professor that can prop up your grade if it’s moving in the wrong direction.
Whether you decide to hire a writing service or tackle a homework assignment on your own, it is important to be aware of the plagiarism-related laws you may encounter, according to management consultant Max Malak at Studybay. Let’s talk about those right now.
First, you should understand that different countries have their own ways of handling these issues. For instance, if you’re studying at a college in the UK, there are robust laws in place to guard against individuals claiming intellectual property as their own. However, things work a little differently in the US. In America:
There are no specific laws on the books that explicitly state you can’t plagiarize something like a term paper.
There are more frequently honor codes that students are meant to adhere to.
Many professors have taken to using AI detectors to determine whether a student violated one of these codes of conduct.
When you come to a university, either in-person or when you start studying there online, it’s highly likely that your instructors will mention the school’s disciplinary code when you start their class. They will probably warn you that the school has a zero-tolerance policy against individuals passing off anything written by someone else as their own.
That being said, if an instructor catches you turning in a paper that someone else wrote, or if part of your paper was plagiarized, they are not going to report you to the FBI or the police. Instead, they’re probably going to do one of the following:
Give you a zero on that assignment.
Publicly shame you in front of the class.
Give you an opportunity to rewrite the paper if it’s a first offense.
Whether a professor gives you another shot if they find that you’ve tried to pass off someone else’s writing as your own will depend on how strict they are. Just know that you’re more than likely going to face discipline enforced by a specific professor or the university you attend rather than facing legal charges in a court of law.
At this point, you may have noticed what you perceive to be a technicality in the academic world that you might potentially take advantage of. You might think, “what if I use one of the many popular artificial intelligence tools that are on the market today to write a term paper rather than stealing that content from a human author?”
If you’re considering that, you’re having the same thought process as thousands of individuals. Many of them are working their way toward degrees at in-person and online universities across the country and around the world. It stands to reason that if you’re faced with the prospect of creating a paper on what you perceive as a boring subject from scratch, and you could just ask ChatGPT to write it for you instead, you would do so.
However, many instructors at the collegiate level not only have rules in place that forbid you from turning in papers that borrowed too closely from published source material, but they also don’t want you to use AI. They may warn you against that in no uncertain terms when the class starts.
Using AI to write a paper might not constitute plagiarism. That doesn’t mean you should do it, though. If you do, you risk getting a failing grade.
This does not completely preclude the possibility of professors allowing you to utilize some of the bespoke AI language learning models that are online right now. Some of these cost money, while others are free. Either way, you might have an instructor who says:
You can use an AI-based tool to help you with an out-of-class assignment.
You should customize the response you’re given rather than turning it in with no revisions.
You’re allowed to use some particular tools, but not others.
Every university and individual in charge of a collegiate-level class has their own unique policy regarding these subjects, so you need to keep track of how each teacher feels about them. If you happen to get a teacher who tells you that you can’t use artificial intelligence of any kind to help with your homework, you should listen to what they say.
It is not unheard of in today’s academic world to get accused of using an AI-based tool to write a paper or to do some other kind of assignment, even if you did not actually do it. The reason for this is simple enough. These tools that supposedly can detect AI-written work were often trained using academic papers. If you write a paper adhering to that particular style, some or all of the work might get flagged as being AI-written.
This is a source of ongoing consternation for students. If you wrote a paper yourself, you are probably going to be furious if someone accuses you of doing the precise thing they warned you against doing.
Unfortunately, figuring out how to get past this issue is not going to be easy, and a simple solution has yet to present itself. Hopefully, as this technology becomes more advanced, it will become easier to differentiate between something that an AI-based tool wrote versus a project that was completely written by a human being.
The best thing you can do to keep from getting tied up in legal or academic trouble is to know how your instructors feel about artificial intelligence and its use before you progress very far in their class. In the US, you’re going to be facing a failing grade, suspension from an institution of higher learning, or possibly even expulsion if you don’t follow the rules.
Those who choose to turn to ChatGPT and similar models when they have received instructions not to do so might jeopardize their academic futures. As expensive as college tuition is, that’s presumably something you want to avoid.
References:
"Plagiarism." Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Accessed 25 July 2024. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plagiarism#:~:text=Plagiarism%20is%20not%20illegal%20in,a%20person's%20school%20or%20workplace.
Copyleaks. "Is Plagiarism Illegal?" Copyleaks Blog, 2024. https://copyleaks.com/blog/is-plagiarism-illegal.
Shorelight. "What Is Plagiarism and How to Avoid It: A Guide for International Students." Shorelight, 2024. https://shorelight.com/student-stories/what-is-plagiarism-and-how-to-avoid-it-a-guide-for-international-students/.
Bowden, Daniel. "Understanding Plagiarism and Copyright Law." Plagiarism Today, 15 March 2022. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/03/15/understanding-plagiarism-and-copyright-law/.
Howard, Rebecca Moore, and Amy E. Robillard, eds. Plagiarism, Citation, and the Consequences of Academic Misconduct. Routledge, 2018.
