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Posted on 05/15/2025 11:08:47 AM PDT by nickcarraway
A senior at Northeastern University filed a formal complaint and demanded a tuition refund after discovering her professor was secretly using AI tools to generate notes. The professor later admitted to using several AI platforms and acknowledged the need for transparency. The incident highlights growing student concerns over professors using AI, a reversal of earlier concerns from professors worried that students would use the technology to cheat. Some students are not happy about their professor’s use of AI. One college senior was so shocked to learn her teacher was using AI to help him create notes that she lodged a formal complaint and asked for a refund of her tuition money, according to the New York Times.
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Ella Stapleton, who enrolled at Northeastern University this academic year, grew suspicious of her business professor’s lecture notes when she spotted telltale signs of AI generation, including a stray “ChatGPT” citation tucked into the bibliography, recurrent typos that mirrored machine outputs, and images depicting figures with extra limbs.
“He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself,” Stapleton said in an interview with the New York Times.
Stapleton lodged a formal complaint with Northeastern’s business school over the incident, focused on her professor’s undisclosed use of AI alongside broader concerns about his teaching approach—and demanded a tuition refund for that course. The claim amounted to just over $8,000.
After a series of meetings, Northeastern ultimately decided to reject the senior’s claim.
The professor behind the notes, Rick Arrowood, acknowledged he used various AI tools—including ChatGPT, the Perplexity AI search engine, and an AI presentation generator called Gamma—in an interview with The New York Times.
“In hindsight…I wish I would have looked at it more closely,” he told the outlet, adding that he now believes that professors ought to give careful thought to integrating AI and be transparent with students about when and how they use it.
“If my experience can be something people can learn from,” he told the NYT, “then, OK, that’s my happy spot.”
Colleges often restrict the use of AI on campus Many schools either outright ban or put restrictions on the use of AI. Students were some of the early adopters of ChatGPT after its release in late 2022, quickly finding they could complete essays and assignments in seconds. The widespread use of the tech created a distrust between students and teachers as professors struggled to identify and punish the use of AI in work.
Now the tables have somewhat turned. Students have been taking to sites including Rate My Professors to complain about their lecturers use or overuse of AI. They also argue that it undermines the fees they pay to be taught by human experts rather than technology they could use for free.
According to Northeastern’s AI policy, any faculty or student must “provide appropriate attribution when using an AI System to generate content that is included in a scholarly publication, or submitted to anybody, publication or other organization that requires attribution of content authorship.”
The policy also states that those who use the technology must: “Regularly check the AI System’s output for accuracy and appropriateness for the required purpose, and revise/update the output as appropriate.”
Representatives for Northeastern did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
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Learn a trade.
College is for losers.
It's like the lawyer who used it for a legal filing, and just asked it if all the citations are real, but if he had checked even one, he would have found out they were all made up.
The professors generate their lectures using AI, and the student write papers and do research using AI. College is increasingly becoming a total waste of money.
““In hindsight…I wish I would have looked at it more closely,” he told the outlet”
In other words he wished he had reworded it more and made it look less obvious that he stole it from AI.
I once asked a psychiatrist (who worked at a hospital I used to work at) if he found that people were becoming “stupid” with the use of the internet
He told me that people were losing their ability to remember . They no longer have to remember anything. All the info is available without retrieving it from their mind.
Now there's a surprise.
I have to agree with this. If you look at historical sources you'll always come away with the impression that people's memories were much better than they are in modern times. And no wonder.
“...people’s memories were much better than they are in modern times.”
“...he wished he had reworded it more and made it look less obvious that he stole it from AI.”
That’s sure what it sounded like, yes!
Stealing AI-generated content without attribution being a victimless crime, why sweat admitting it!
That’s why it’s 70 years old I memorize new prayers . I also make myself wrack my brain for at least an hour before I will relook it up on the internet.
Is he a tenured professor? Because most professors are not.
Most professors teach courses at multiple colleges, just to make ends meet.
So, of course, they are going to look for shortcuts.
A. I. “How I became a brain surgeon”
* Uncle Jeb showed me how. - Jethro
IOW, he wishes he had been more careful about hiding what he was doing.
I’m sorry I got caught...
She should sue.
I'd want my money back, too, if I found out that my so-called professor needed someone else's notes to teach his class.
-PJ
This from business faculty?
Close on 40 years ago, I had a college math prof and a high school English teacher bemoan the kids these days lack of ability to visualize stuff in their minds. They had almost no imagination and both said it was because with TV the input was being done for them. The images were being fed right into their eyes and the sound also was a given.
SO they had trouble imagining what was going on in a story and visualizing something like what shape you would get if you rotated circle about the Y axis of a graph. (Probably technically revolved it around, but the point was made.)
Yes, as a matter of necessity! The same way blind people cultivate the other senses as a means of compensation.
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