Is Using AI Cheating? Tips for Ethical Use

Let us start this article with a simple question, and you have to answer honestly that have you ever tried to write your assignment or any article using AI tools? So if your answer is yes? Then I want to ask you a second question: whether this was not cheating? If you still do not have the answer to this, then do not worry because there is confusion in the entire writing and content industry about whether it is ethical to use AI tools or not, and if it is ethical, then how we should use it.

This question is quite popular in the content writing or content generation field, because students and beginner writers feel that when AI tools can write their content so professionally in minutes without any hard work, then why do they need to write it themselves? If you look at it, this argument is correct to some extent, but people do not know how to use AI ethically.

So today in this detailed article, we will try to know whether using AI tools for writing or content creation is cheating, and how we can use it ethically and if you are a student, then we will also understand how you can finally use AI responsibly in your education. In this detailed article, I will give you unbiased information based on my 4 years of content writing experience on AI usage and its ethics, so please read this article completely for complete information.

Quick Summary

The use of AI tools for content generation largely depends on how they're utilized, and the confusion around this arises from the lack of clear guidelines from many institutions and companies. AI itself is not inherently cheating; it all depends on the purpose and the specific rules set by your organization or institution. For instance, using AI to complete an assignment for an exam, where the goal is to assess your skills, is cheating. Similarly, if a content writer’s company requires original, human-generated content, using AI to write articles would be a violation of company guidelines and considered unethical.

What is AI?

You must be hearing about AI everywhere these days, but most people do not know the exact definition of AI, due to which if they are asked what AI is, they are not able to describe it properly, let us try to understand AI in simple language, (Ai) artificial intelligence, as its name itself sounds, it is a kind of artificial technology made by humans which has intelligence capabilities, there is no exact criteria of AI as to what capabilities a particular platform or model should have, only then it can be called AI, because if any software has thinking capabilities then that too is AI and if any model has self-decision capabilities then, We can also call it AI.

Generally, AI software can have thinking, generative and action taking capabilities, and currently it is being used in all the important sectors because, compared to humans, it can manage vast data speedily. AI software can handle the data and analyze it easily, which is not so easy to do manually by humans.

In educational and writing fields, ChatGPT, Grammarly and AssignmentGPT AI are the best examples of AI which can help you from grammar checking to designing a flowchart.

Are students cheating when they use AI?

Let's discuss the most important question that if you are using an AI tool for your studies, then is it cheating? Well, it depends on many factors, let's try to understand it in a little detail.

Let's try to understand it from a classroom scenario. The 12th class science teacher asked all the students to write a 5-page assignment on Botany. A student named Karan opened ChatGPT, typed a prompt and got the results in 1 minute. He copied and pasted the result and also submitted the content to the teacher as his assignment. On the other hand, there is a student named Ravi in the class who first did research on the Botany subject, in which he used ChatGPT and perplexity for research and sources. After that, he outlined the assignment based on his research and his experience. After that, he wrote the assignment himself, and to make the assignment more visually appealing, he used AssignmentGPT Ai diagram maker tool. And he used it to make attractive diagrams and flowcharts in his assignment.

Now tell me honestly, who cheated out of the two? In both scenarios, students used AI, but one student used AI to cheat while the other used AI to enhance his creativity. I hope you have understood the ethical and unethical ways of AI usage from both scenarios.

Why Do Students Use AI in the First Place?

Based on my personal academic experience, I will try to tell you why students prefer AI so much and also understand whether students use AI knowingly or if there is a situation in their academic life that they have to use AI tools.

1. Time constraints and academic pressure

Mostly students' academic life is very time consuming because they have to attend different classes from morning to evening, study from evening to night, notes making, prepare for examinations, due to which most of the students feel burnout and many students do part time jobs because they also have their own personal responsibilities, due to which they do not have time for extra activities like assignments, writing research based essays, etc. Due to this also many students also use AI tools to complete academic tasks before the deadline.

2. Accessibility and learning support

Students who have disabilities or language barriers or who have learning difficulties also use AI because it acts as a lifeline for them. AI tools can simplify and summarize complex topics and help disabled students in learning.

3. AI as a tutor or explainer

Many a times it happens that students have to prepare for exams and they don't have much time or if the student belongs to rural areas where good teachers are not available, in such a case Ai tools like AssignmentGPT teacher bot and Mock interview tool prove to be quite helpful for them, because in this they can gain live education without human support, and it is also accessible to most of the students. AI tools are also quite good explainers because they have a vast data collection, due to which you get to know about the solving process along with the answer.

Also read this article : Using AI for Effortless Lesson Planning

How to avoid cheating with AI

We have understood in great detail how to use Artificial Intelligence, or AI, for academic tasks. Now, let us understand how you can use AI in the right way so that it is ethical and does not involve cheating.

1. Use AI tools for productivity: Always remember one thing that whether you use AI tools for academic purposes or for any other purpose, always use them to increase your creativity, productivity and do not use it as a replacement for your work. And we have already understood in our previous heading how AI can be used for productivity from 2 student scenarios.

2. Be transparent: Even if you have used AI tools, you must disclose in your content why you have used AI and in which part of the article you have used AI. For this, you can give different text colour and content disclaimer for the AI content so that transparency and trust are maintained between you and your institution, audience.

3. Follow your institution's Guidelines: Whether you are doing content writing or writing assignments, essays for academic purposes, you must read the content guidelines and policies of your college, university or your company to know whether you have to use AI tools or not and what is the limit of using AI tools.

Best ways to use AI without cheating

By now, you must have understood how you can use AI tools without cheating, but if you don’t know what the ethical process of using AI tools then there is no need to worry because we are going to know in detail how we can use AI tools without cheating.

1. Summarizing: As we know that AI tools can quickly summarize complex and detailed content in short paragraphs, hence you can use them for the research purpose of your articles, essays or assignments. This will also save you a lot of time because in manual research, you may have to read thousands of pages of content.

2. Generating ideas: If you are not getting any ideas for your content or you are not getting clarity on any topic, then you can use AI tools because AI tools can help you in outlining your topic and can give you knowledge of different angles and themes of your topic.

3. Outlines: If you are not able to understand how to start your assignment, essay, or which heading or subheading to choose, then AI tools can help you a lot in this because they can convert your ideas into a mature outline.

4. Recommend research: As you know, research requires reading a lot of books, articles and topics, and for this, AI tools can help you a lot as they can suggest articles, research papers similar to your topic.

5. Revisions and suggestions: If you have drafted your content but you want to make it more professional and polished, AI tools can fix your common errors, grammar slips, which increases the clarity of the content and also increases the readability of the content.

6. In-text examples: AI can provide you with a lot of examples and sample cases according to your complex topics.

7. Feedback: If you still have doubts about whether your content is engaging or not, AI tools can help you a lot in this, because AI tools can give you the right feedback and suggestions according to the quality of your content.

8. Proofreading: If there are spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors in your content, then you can also use AI tools for this to fix the issues in your content.

9. Study aids: AI tools can also help you a lot in your studies. AI tools can easily prepare flashcards or quizzes for you. AI tools can prepare custom study material for you.

10. Write citations: Formatting the content in your assignments or articles in APA, MLA, or Chicago style is quite difficult, but these tools can do it easily for you.

How Teachers Can Support Ethical AI Use

Schools and teachers play the most important role in students' lives for proper guidance, and to a great extent, they must guide their students about how to use AI tools ethically.

1. Teach students how to prompt AI responsibly

Teachers should teach their students prompt writing, because only when students give a correct prompt will they get useful results. For this, educators can guide students for research purposes on how to use AI ethically.

2. Share case studies/examples of proper vs improper use

How correct or wrong it is to use AI tools varies a lot from topic to topic and institution to institution. That is why educators should guide their students about examples and different scenarios about how it is appropriate and inappropriate to use AI tools.

3. Provide AI literacy training

Just like digital literacy or financial literacy, educators should educate their students about AI literacy so that they have the right information about the working of AI and its usage. For this, colleges, universities can organize workshops, webinars. Apart from this, they can also educate about AI usage, its capabilities and limits through tutorials.

Read More : Benefits and Risks of AI for Teachers

Some Key Ways to Prevent Students from Cheating with AI

Let us now try to understand how institutions can create such an environment so that students avoid using AI tools and use them ethically.

1. Using AI Detection Tools to Identify Cheating

If you are an educator or a teacher, whenever you check your students’ assignments or projects, try to use popular AI detection tools like Copyleaks AI detector, AssignmentGPT AI Detector, so that you can suspiciously flag AI content and manually check it to confirm whether the content is AI written or human written.

2. Redesigning Assessments

Instead of giving students generic essays or multiple-choice tests, it is better to give students real-world problems or unique projects to increase critical thinking. Students should be assigned projects that AI cannot write.

3. Academic Integrity

Colleges and universities can promote original content to maintain academic integrity and make their students aware of the real-world consequences of cheating.

4. AI-Resistant Assignments

Students should be recommended to use personal experiences, creative writing in content, so that such projects cannot be easily written by AI.

5. Draft/Progress Submissions

It should be mandatory for students to submit drafts of content, notes and progress updates at the time of final submission so that teachers can get help in checking the content by authority. Draft content also gives teachers an idea about the critical thinking of the student.

6. Encouraging Ethical AI Use Instead of Banning It

Banning AI tools is not a permanent solution, but students should be encouraged and educated about how they can use AI ethically. Because AI tools can prove to be genuinely helpful in many work, there is no logic in banning them.

7. Classwork or Real-time assignments

Instead of giving students homework, it is better to give them assignments in class so that students have to write real-time assignments, so that they cannot use AI tools in class, and AI tools can be prevented from being used unethically.

8. AI advances

Educators should provide training or education about the advancement of AI so that students can stay updated with new AI tools. And colleges, universities should organize enough AI training workshops for all their staff

Conclusion

In today's time, there is absolutely no understanding of not using AI tools; therefore, it is important for students to get proper guidance for academic purposes. Educators should create awareness among students about AI usage so that they use it for creativity and not as a replacement for themselves.

When students and teachers use AI together ethically, it will increase the quality of education to a great extent. Because for balancing future education, AI tools are as important as books. So next time, whenever you use AI, do it for your creativity and not for copy-and-paste.

FAQs