The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe? | Robert Topinka

In the desperate scramble to combat AI, there is a real danger of penalising students who have done nothing wrong

• Robert Topinka a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London

When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: 100% AI-generated".

Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first 100% AI-generated" essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.

Robert Topinka is a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London