MU Faculty Council hears report on academic integrity in the age of AI

The University of Missouri is paying attention to artificial intelligence, said Ben Trachtenberg, director of the MU office of academic integrity.

He delivered his talk on Academic Integrity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence on Thursday to the MU Faculty Council in Cornell Hall.

"A good university is going to teach its student how to learn about this stuff," Trachtenberg said.

The Office of Academic Integrity name has changed, he joked.

"It's the Office of AI now," he said.

Wording related to artificial intelligence was added to the University of Missouri System's collected rules and regulations in August 2023, Trachtenberg said.

It prohibits use of artificial intelligence in student assignments without permission from the instructor. AI also can't be used to cheat or plagiarize.

"The answer to 'Do AI detectors work?' is not really," Trachtenberg said.

An instructor who suspects a student used AI to write a paper should instead rely on the evidence that the student knows nothing about the topic which the student wrote about, Trachtenberg said.

"I don't want to be an anti-AI doomer," Trachtenberg said. "I think AI is going to be with us."

In fact, revolutionary medical and scientific research is being conducted using AI, he said.

There needs to be distinctions drawn between work that is AI-generated versus something that is AI-assisted, said Kevin Brown, a faculty member in the MU department of theater.

"We obviously can't be Luddites," Brown said.

He's creating AI art, he said.

"It's really a kind of critical moment in our society," Brown said after the talk. It's equivalent to the invention of the light bulb, he said.

An AI task force being formed looking at how faculty uses AI to teach and what students should be learning about AI, or AI literacy, Trachtenberg said.

Stradling both is the ethics issue, he said.

Names have been submitted for the AI Task Force, said Tom Warhover, chairman of the Faculty Council.

"I think they're trying to move that very quickly," Warhover said.

His office hears cases related to cheating, plagiarism or the unauthorized use of artificially-generated content, he said.

The cases are reported by instructors and the overwhelmingly involve undergraduate students, he said.

There have been 163 reports filed so far this school year.

There were 498 cases in 2020-21 "during COVID when everyone was losing their minds," Trachtenberg said.

Instructors decide on a student's grade, independent of the action of his office, he said.

"We're not in the business of throwing students out of school for fairly minor academic dishonesty cases," Trachtenberg said.

Even in more serious cases, a student may receive a warning for a first offense, he said.

Faculty members should consider that students may not know what's expected in terms of citations and use of sources or collaboration with other students, Trachtenberg said.

Students don't want to disappoint instructors they know, he said.

"Students who have rapport with faculty members are less likely to cheat," he said.

Roger McKinney is the Tribune's education reporter. You can reach him at rmckinney@columbiatribune.com or 573-815-1719. He's on X at @rmckinney9.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Here's how AI's role is changing at the University of Missouri