It’s either ironic or inevitable, I can’t decide which, that the local college which is the most enthusiastic about staying on top of the technologies known as artificial intelligence should be the first to have an A.I. controversy spin out of control. As an added twist, it happened right before a conference called “A.I. at 70: What should remain human?”
The controversy, as the Valley News reports, came to a head Wednesday when Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell resigned and left the university “after a faculty-led committee found he used artificial intelligence in his writing without properly disclosing it.”
In a report dated Oct. 27, the committee found that Schnell “used A.I. to meaningfully alter his writing in violation of at least one publication’s A.I. use and/or disclosure requirement, failed to disclose his use of A.I. in clear violation of a national newspaper’s stated policy, was not forthcoming about his A.I. use,” and fell short of Dartmouth’s ethics and professionalism standards, the Valley News wrote.
The college investigation was prodded by press reports – including from The Dartmouth, the independent student newspaper – about A.I. use in Schnell’s publications.
The news drew national attention because nobody could resist the irony of it happening at Dartmouth, which trumpets itself as a leader in using and understanding A.I. Dartmouth College has embraced the technology, putting A.I. into many courses and making it subject of conferences galore. And the college loves to remind us that the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at Dartmouth in 1956 when it held the first high-level academic gathering on the topic.
With all that insight swirling around Schnell, including considerable discussion about the pushback against using A.I. in academia, how could a smart, well-educated person (he’s a mathematical biologist) in a high-profile job where lots of people read your work be so naive as to think they could use large language models without being noticed?
Because human beings are an illogical species with a unsurpassed ability to fool ourselves, I guess.
Pres reports said Schnell said he used A.I. for “language refinement, copy editing, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient” and didn’t think it went over the line.
Aside from spellcheck I have not used A.I. for writing because my prose is already perfection, so my insight is limited. But I can see how “language refinement” could over time morph into “I have an idea but I’m too busy to turn it into a paragraph so you do it, which is OK because it’s the idea that counts” and finally become “just write the darn thing for me.”
Interestingly, the Valley News reported “The committee said it did not use AI detection tools. Instead, it reviewed Schnell’s logs from Dartmouth’s enterprise AI tool, Claude, along with his emails.” That’s good because AI detection tools have proven to be incredibly unreliable.
Undisclosed A.I. writing is showing up in a lot of prominent places. A recent example is Japanese novelist Rie Kudan, who admits A.I wrote at least 5% of her award-winning “The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy.” She seems pretty unapologetic about it, however, saying she’ll use A.I. as she sees fit.
Incidentally, I am moderating a panel Nov. 14 at the 603 Writers Conference in Concord about A.I. and literature. There will certainly be no shortage of things to talk about!
