AI apologies

A story from The New York Times (gift link):

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had.

Using AI to write an e-mail to a professor seems an especially witless way to use AI, as if that professor could not possibly have seen a nearly identical or identical such message before.

In 2023 I made the following addition to my read-all-over post How to e-mail a professor:

Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.

When I asked ChatGPT in 2023 to generate an e-mail requesting an assignment, here’s what resulted. The first sentence: “I hope this email finds you well.” And it gets better (worse) from there.

Have the results improved? Don’t know. Don’t care either.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[The Illinois story is from last October. I sincerely apologize for missing it then. Thanks, Lu!]