Dr. Berry and Dr. Ivers on plagiarism, technology and human connectedness
Dr. Sarah Berry is an assistant professor of English at the University of Dallas. Dr. Christi Ivers is an associate professor of Spanish in the Modern Languages Department at the University of Dallas.
Q: When someone says the word “AI,” or the phrase “AI” in reference to academic work, what specifically does that make you think of?
Dr. Berry: I think [of] natural language processing, like ChatGPT… I know that there [are] other applications for analyzing data and identifying patterns for academic research. But, in my experience, students aren’t using those. Maybe some researchers are, but that’s not really what I encounter today.
Dr. Ivers: As a language teacher, we’ve been trying to figure out what to do with artificial intelligence for 15 or 20 [years], I mean, as long as I’ve been a teacher, even before grad school, because the machine translators are also AI.
Q: Have you ever had to deal one-on-one with students caught using AI or plagiarizing, specifically with using AI? What was that experience like for you as a professor?
Dr. Berry: Probably every semester that I’ve taught, I’ve had situations with students plagiarizing, but now with ChatGPT, over the last two, maybe two-and-a-half years, I have usually four or five students a semester instead of just one. That’s just in my experience, but it seems like a kind of five-fold increase in cheating on assignments and mainly in Lit Trad, although in other classes too.
I found that AI-assisted cheating is so quantitatively different…but I think it’s also qualitatively different, for two reasons. I think one is related to frequency. It makes it hard to grade. It makes me paranoid. It makes me resent grading in a way that I didn’t before, and it makes it really hard to engage with student writing in the right way, because I’m constantly thinking, “Is this a human being or not?”
And for the students that are using AI to write things, they’re not getting the helpful feedback that they need either; whether or not I’m catching it, they’re not getting the feedback that’s actually going to help them become better writers.
Dr. Ivers: I think, for me, the breach of trust is the very worst thing, because it just affects everything. It affects the way that I view them in the classroom. The few students that we had conversations about this it poisoned our relationship for the rest of the semester. They were angry, they were resentful, they were defensive, and all the things that I love about being a teacher were just… And it made me feel gross walking into the classroom; even if a student wasn’t actively doing anything, that was always living in my brain. And it just really, really hurts.
…And then the other thing that’s hard about it is, in some classes, the professors say, “Use it. Please use AI, it’s great. I encourage it, and we’re going to explore it, and I’m going to penalize you if you don’t use it. And some classes are telling their students, “If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re not going to be at the front of your profession when you graduate.” And then some of us say, “You cannot use it at all, not even a single bit, not even a little,” and so a student has six different ideas about what AI is and what it can do and how to use it. And I think it creates a lot of confusion.
Dr. Berry: And I’m sympathetic — if a student can’t even remember, “Am I supposed to submit this as a PDF, and am I supposed to do a print copy, or am I supposed to email it, am I supposed to submit it to Brightspace?” If they can’t keep that straight for six courses, how are they supposed to keep straight the professors that are saying, “Use this,” “Don’t use this.” I really am sympathetic, especially to the plight of freshmen, because I think they are getting mixed messages when they do not yet even understand what they’re using.
Dr. Ivers: I just think it’s so troubling. You open up a PDF, right? You’re a student, you have your first laptop, and you’re ready to do your assignment, and you open up the PDF that your professor assigns you, and the first thing that pops up on the screen is, “Would you like a summary of this?” And you know, “I have three other classes, I have other stuff to read, my mom wants me to come home and babysit my younger siblings, and then I have to do laundry, and then I have my job at the library. I could read this, and it would take however long, but all I have to do is click ‘Yes.’ And then I can come to class and have what I’m trusting to be a legitimate summary.” And how would I know that’s not ok?
Dr. Berry: In psychology, there’s a technology-device distinction that we use kind of interchangeably and colloquially. But technology, right? If you think about “techne,” it requires and augments skill to use it, whereas a device is something that’s created for you just to make something easier. So a smartphone is not, in that strict sense, technology, it’s a device. It’s designed to make the things I do on a daily basis easier. It doesn’t require any skill for me to use Google Maps to get somewhere, right? To be able to read a map nowadays, it requires some knowledge and some skill. And I think with AI there are people who are using AI as technology, are using it with their knowledge and their disciplinary training to learn things, to figure things out, to do things that we couldn’t do before. But a first year student in any discipline is probably not able to use AI as technology, for augmenting “techne,” right? They’re using it as a device, as a shortcut to make something easier.
Dr. Ivers: I think that intentionality is so important, and that it’s a discipline that I think all of us want our students to develop, and this is a way we can do it. And we are, in some ways, I think, just kind of unlucky that we are the ones who just got plunked into being in education at various levels, when this is coming to our collective use; because developments around thinking and writing have been happening since 300 B.C., when Socrates says in the Phaedrus to the person who allegedly invented letters, “You think that you’re going to increase people’s memory and that you’re going to increase people’s wisdom by letters, so now we can record these things. But it’s actually going to make people more forgetful, and it’s going to give them a semblance of wisdom without actually having wisdom.”
Dr. Berry: I think that’s right. I think there are advantages…there are good things about sitting on this cusp or on this wave. As a teacher, it affords you, it forces you to think about your teaching. It forces you think about whether the assignments that you’re writing are working. It can make you a better teacher for everyone, because it makes you reassess why you ask students to do what you ask them to do, and how you do this… It’s very hard to figure out how to still get the opportunity for revision and thought, sustained thought, if all your assignments are in class. But I think with time, we will figure out ways to do this.
Dr. Ivers: And to scholars of reading and writing, I think…for our disciplines, writing is inextricable from thought. And to me, the thing that AI does is it circumvents that… I think maybe UD has a better chance than some other universities of reminding students, or showing students for the first time, the value of lingering in that uncertainty and sometimes just staring at a blank page. The virtue of staring at a blank page or a blank screen and feeling that I don’t know what to write, and just living with that for a little bit and figuring out ways to work through it. Because the ways you work through it, they make us more human, you develop resilience. You think over multiple ways of doing something. You talk to your friends. You actually go to your professor’s office and talk to them. But if your default is, “This is uncomfortable, how can I make the discomfort go away? Oh, here is something in front of me that can put words on my page.” Yes, you have words on your page, but, how much do you not have anymore?
Dr. Berry: Someone made the observation that 20 years from now, the mark of a college-educated person will be whether or not they can think, they can speak, they can respond to questions and think in real time in conversation, as opposed to having to have AI to write something out. Textual writing, especially online, will continue, but people’s ability to do it without AI assistance will atrophy over time. And so the people who really are college educated and take it seriously, actually let themselves be educated by the classes that they take, will have the ability to do things like respond to a question in conversation without being able to look something up.
Dr. Ivers: The idea of pondering something and kicking something around, and living with that ignorance for a little bit longer and letting your imagination provide possibilities, that’s rare nowadays. And so what folks say is, “Everyone has knowledge,” or “Everyone can get access to knowledge. So what are we trying to do with people at university?” And it’s resourcefulness, right?…the people who want a shortcut have wanted a shortcut since the beginning of time, but the people who actually want to learn, they don’t, I think they want to learn so they can connect with humans. [For me, that’s what language is about. Learning a language is about broadening your opportunities to be in a relationship with people and and technology can, or devices can facilitate things expediently, but I don’t think it’s ever going to replace our human desire to be in relationship with each other.
Dr: Berry: If your only interaction with people who speak another language is just transactional, then maybe it replaces that desire. But I think everyone, especially young people who were in high school or college in the era of COVID lockdowns, are tired of having relationships mediated by technology. And so if you have to do it, you have to do it, but the second that you love someone that speaks another language you have no interest in, you want to do it the right way, right? And I think that there’s already a kind of reaction against the disembodiment. What seemed like connections that were made possible by technology now feel like disconnections;they make us more lonely than we were before. And I wonder if something similar will happen with natural language processing.
Dr. Ivers: Yeah, I love that analogy. I do have hope too, that things will kind of settle into place, and then that if AI can persist, that it will do things that human brains can’t do, like run a billion different molecules through a system, or mathematical formulas. I respect the use of AI in the sciences and mathematics and in business, and AI in cyber security, and I’m not speaking to that like, I’m just speaking as a teacher of language and of writing. They are the experts of…definite things that AI can do, and that lots of sort of machines and computers can do, that humans can’t do, but humans can write, and humans think, yeah, and let that and let’s do those things.
Dr. Berry: I think that’s a good distinction to make. Like using AI to do something that you can’t, that a human being can’t do, that’s useful. Using AI to do something that a human being can do leads to human beings no longer being able to do those things, and that’s a problem.
Dr. Ivers: …[F]or me, the stakes feel low. Like, write a paragraph, answer a question, read the PDF. But I think that at least for some students that I’ve talked to, the stakes are very high […] the emotional or the psychological ramifications of getting a less than desirable grade can lead people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do, and and then, on top of everything else, they get hauled up in front of the dean and possibly fail a class or possibly get a zero. And so I think […] that there’s a discrepancy between the way that professors approach this and think about it, and the way that students might come to these sorts of decisions, and it can have serious consequences. If a student gets called up for plagiarism or cheating or academic dishonesty, it can have consequences on their psyche more than just a grade that scares me a lot, that really, really scares me, that me trying to help a student learn better, could make them do something.
Dr. Berry: And I think about that too. I think all of us would much rather deter it than prosecute it… because it makes you into a worse teacher, and it creates a breach, not just between you and the student that you’re suspicious of, but you and all the students, like we’re saying earlier, but thinking about how to deter it can actually make you a better teacher. It’s all these things that I never said aloud to students because I thought that they just knew – now I have to say them out loud. But that’s good. That’s good for everybody…
Q: Is there anything else that you would say to students who might feel they continue to put themselves in that position and maybe just aren’t reaching out or something?
Dr. Ivers: I mean, we have the resource of Optimal Work. I don’t know how students consider it, but learning how my brain works, learning how my brain procrastinates and why, and learning how to manage my emotions when I’m in a moment of stress, or facing a deadline, or learning how to put myself in the frame of mind that makes me to be the most productive. I use those tools, I watch those videos, and I feel like I’m a better scholar. And so I would encourage people, if they haven’t, to look into that resource and talk to Academic Success about how to get access to that.
Dr. Berry: …[W]hat I always tell students is [that] I would rather see anything that you wrote, even if it’s just starting with a list of the things that you know you need to do. Even if a professor says no extensions, send them the paper with the to-do list that you made of the things that you wanted to do that you didn’t have time to do. Give them something that shows that you’re putting in effort and that you’re thinking about it, and you didn’t just blow off the assignment. But even in situations where you know you don’t have more time […] ask for grace, because everyone at this school would rather see what a student wrote than something that somebody else wrote and and, and everyone would rather see something than nothing, right? So, as a gesture of good faith, you can give them notes [or an] annotated page. Anything that you can give them is better than nothing. And anything you did is better than something somebody else did.
This article has been edited for length. For the full transcript of this interview, you can visit our website at thecorchronicle.com.