What to do when you’re accused of AI cheating

Were you falsely accused of AI cheating? Now what? Don’t panic; in this article, we’ll share three steps on how you can handle this situation. 

The recent proliferation of AI writing tools has made a big difference in productivity among individuals, especially students. 

However, this comes with a downside. Students can also use these generative AI tools to cheat. 

Now, schools, teachers, and professors are starting to take drastic action to punish students who use AI writing tools, so they turn to these AI-detecting tools to check if a student's work is AI-generated. 

Reasons Why You’re Accused of AI-cheating

There are one of three reasons why you might get accused of AI cheating.  

1. False Positive Issues With AI Detectors

One reason why you might get accused of AI cheating is the use of AI checkers. Professors or teachers at school will examine your assignments using AI-detecting tools that sometimes suffer from false positives and then falsely accuse you of AI cheating. 

2. Inaccurate Facts Found in Your Writing

Another reason why your instructor accuses you of AI cheating is that inaccurate facts were found in your essay. You know sometimes you could ask AI a question or have it explain something to you; as some of these AI writing tools do not have access to the internet, they could provide you with the wrong answers or even make up inaccurate facts. 

3. Poor Sentence Structure and Obvious AI Words

Sometimes the sentence structure and choice of words can sound robotic and somewhat strange; all these reasons could have your writing flagged as AI-generated. 

However, if you’ve been falsely accused of AI cheating, here are three steps to prove your innocence.

3 Steps to take when you’re falsely accused of AI cheating 

1. Have a Polite, Non-accusatory Conversation With Your Instructor

Now, the first thing you want to do is gather some reports or resources (blog posts) on the inaccuracy of these AI-detecting tools and have a polite, non-accusatory conversation with your teacher. 

For example, Turnitin has a blog post that addresses the issue of inaccurate AI detectors. 

They also openly admitted that their tool will have false positives, so you can use this as a resource to point out that there are false positive issues with these AI-detecting tools. 

With this, you can have your instructor understand that just because an AI detector claims your writing is AI-generated doesn’t mean it is. 

This information can help them act accordingly and help you manage the AI cheating accusation without being all defensive and argumentative with your professor. 

2. Have Someone Advocate for You

Given that there is a high possibility of you getting suspended or kicked out of college, the second step you want to take is to have some sort of advocate prove your work is original.  

This can be a student defense attorney or a student union set up by your college or university. 

Having someone support you can also help handle the situation of you being falsely accused of AI cheating. 

Moreover, you want to know that there could be some AI words, phrases, or sentence structures unknown to you that may have your professor identify your work as AI-generated.

So, before resubmitting your work and having someone advocate for you, you want to go through your work thoroughly to identify certain awkward phrases or words that sound redundant and erase them from your writing. 

You don’t want to rely on proofreading tools like Grammarly because it can also have an impact on your writing being flagged as AI-generated. 

So instead, you want to get an editor to proofread your writing and possibly suggest some tips to improve it. 

3. Show Evidence that Your Work is Original 

Now the third step, and probably the most important of all, is collecting evidence that shows your work is original. 

If you use Google Docs to write your documents, it can be easy to show the authenticity of your work. 

Google Docs tracks and helps save your drafts when writing to avoid future AI cheating accusations. 

But how do you do this? On Google Docs, you can go to File > Version History > See Version History to have a look at edits made, different versions, and when you started writing, to how your document has expanded over time. 

You can also install the extension called Draftback to give your instructor or teacher a replay of your writing history. This will show everything from the start to the end of your writing process. 

Once you install the extension, you can see all edits and an overview of your document that shows an analytics page where you can see what date you started working on the document, how many changes, and how much you wrote within a time frame.  

If you’re using a tool like Microsoft Word on OneDrive or SharePoint, there is a similar feature to Google Docs that helps you track your writing process. 

Simply go to File> History to show your edits over time and the whole writing process.

If you were given an assignment that involved research, you want to include proper citations in your writing and footnotes to serve as supporting evidence to prove you wrote your assignment yourself. 

You could also provide brief notes you took during research or show your browser history if you did your research online.

Conclusion 

False accusations of AI cheating are becoming more common, students are getting failed for writing their own papers, and the worst part is that professors don’t cross-check students work by themselves but rather incorporate AI-detecting tools that sometimes can be unreliable and inaccurate. 

By staying calm, proofreading your work, having an attorney or your union support your work, and providing evidence, you can manage the situation professionally.

Remember to save your drafts, reword awkward sentences and phrases, and provide citations to your facts and research process to avoid being accused of AI cheating in the future.