I borrow and adapt this AI policy from my colleague, Marissa Fenley (Bryn Mawr), who has borrowed and adapted it from our other colleague, Olivia Stowell (University of Virginia)
AI use in this class is, in every instance, unacceptable. Every assignment is designed in order to provide you with the opportunity to engage with the material and develop your own thinking without corrosive interference. Violations of this policy will result in a charge of plagiarism and treated accordingly (at the very least an automatic F on the assignment, without opportunity for resubmission).
These are some of the considerations behind this policy:
- This class is designed to improve your writing, thinking, and imaginative skills; if you’re not writing, thinking, or imagining, you’re not improving.
- Using AI opens up academic honesty issues, both because it raises the question of whether the work is "your" work, and also because tools like ChatGPT rely on taking uncredited material from scholars and writers (see here)
- Using AI does not produce reliably accurate results (see here, here, and here).
- ChatGPT has serious negative environmental impacts. For instance, ChatGPT uses 7-10 times more energy than a Google search (see here), uses about one 16 oz water bottle for every 5-50 queries to cool its data centers (see here) and the C02 emissions for training a single large learning model are equal 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing (see here).
- AI is also putting massive strain on the energy grid (see here) and data centers are disproportionately built in poor and rural communities who are already the inheritors of environmental racism and classism (see here, here, and here)
- OpenAI and other AI companies have exploited workers from the global south, especially workers in prisons and refugee camps, and workers in Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere (see here, here, here, here, here, and here)
- AI is actively destroying knowledge archives and historical materials in order to consume, and ultimately degrade, language and discourse (see here).
