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Their professors caught them cheating. They used AI to apologise
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Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confronted students in their introductory data science course after receiving identical apology e-mails that were written by AI.
PHOTO: ANJALI PINTO/NYTIMES
Neil Vigdor And Hannah Ziegler
NEW YORK – Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via e-mail.
But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the e-mails. Artificial Intelligence (AI) had, according to Associate Professor Karle Flanagan and Professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo.
