In the desperate scramble to combat AI, there is a real danger of penalising students who have done nothing wrong * Robert Topinka a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: “100% AI-generated”. Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first “100% AI-generated” essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style. Robert Topinka is a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London Continue reading... [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/13/software-student-cheated-combat-ai]