Profs, busted

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They’re Defending Themselves.” An excerpt:

Two professors recently admitted to using generative AI to assist them in writing opinion articles for major publications, igniting a debate over the standards faculty should be held to in their public writing.

The Financial Times added an addendum to a guest essay published August 13, disclosing that its author, Ricardo Hausmann, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, had used AI to “condense” his piece condemning President Trump’s tariffs, in violation of the outlet’s policy. The Financial Times is conducting an “editorial review process” to evaluate the piece in more detail, a spokesperson said in a statement. Hausmann said in an email that he hadn’t been aware of the policy when writing the article, adding that he believes AI is becoming too common for policies like that to exist.

On Tuesday, The Daily Californian reported that Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley, had used AI to edit an August 15 San Francisco Standard opinion article. The piece argued that the UC system was admitting underqualified students because it doesn’t consider standardized testing, and cited the fact that some students use AI to write admissions essays as a reason to bring back such requirements. A spokesperson for The Standard said in a statement that it allows AI use to assist with writing, but expects that “humans are behind every article.” The piece reflects Stankova and her colleagues’ “original analysis, research, and expertise,” the spokesperson added.

Hausmann violated the outlet’s guidelines; Stankova didn’t. But beyond a newspaper’s code of conduct, what ethical responsibility — if any — do professors have when it comes to AI in their public-facing work, given that students are generally expected to refrain from using it to write?

The justifications from Hausmann and Stankova that the article goes on to detail are, well, something. What’s the harm? And everybody’s going to be doing it anyway.

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[I’m not interested in focusing OCA on AI in academia. But I couldn’t pass up this item in the news.]