Citizen Science No. 4 by Jamie Zvirzdin

AI Renaissance: A Chance to Reduce Cheating,
Revitalize the School Experience

Middle school is hard. It feels like the Dark Ages. There’s extra insecurity, boundary-testing, and of course, hormones. The pressure to perform well in school ramps up—as does the temptation to cheat. My 13-year-old son and his generation face an additional challenge: smartphones, online answer banks and now artificial intelligence services have made cheating very, very easy. And dishonesty in academics leads to dishonesty elsewhere, including in professional scientific research.

This isn’t a hand-wringing article about the moral decrepitude of cheaters, however; it is a wake-up call to teachers and educational administrators to change the game. Our expensive, competitive, performance-based emphasis on exams and grades have created a conflict-of-interest situation for students. It’s a system-design problem that continues right on into science circles, where fudging results equals grants and promotions. Researchers Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely found in their 2015 paper “Dishonesty in Scientific Research,” that even good people who value honesty justify cutting corners given these high-stakes situations. By reducing conflict-of-interest situations for students as often as possible, AI can actually help us usher in a new age of academic enlightenment, where learning is once again a privilege and a pleasure. If science institutions follow suit, we’ll also have more accurate data sets and better scientists.