Recently, with the revolution caused by recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), I have observed how the use and abuse of AI-based tools has become popular among my students. A misuse, sometimes conscious but other times unconscious because it is a tool and the student himself is the one who handles it. Talking to different students, I perceive that they put the morality of the act in whether they manipulate the tool or not, and not so much in the intellectual property of what is delivered.
Obviously AI is a tool and as such it has no morality, as long as it does not have conscience, freedom and voluntariness for its actions. Therefore, the morality of the acts we perform using AI will depend on the use we make of the tool. That is, not everything we, students or teachers, do using AI involves academic dishonesty. However, if through the use of AI we are presenting as our own something that has been generated practically entirely by said intelligence, there is a situation of dishonesty.
There are tools that help us search for bibliography such as research rabbit or translate texts such as chatgpt itself. We can use, without any problem, AI tools that help us search for information, that allow us to better understand a text or give us a general overview of what we want to study or write. However, even if we ourselves ask the tool to generate answers or an essay, that text or answers are not our authorship. And, therefore, applying the value of honesty, key to academic integrity according to the International Center for Academic Integrity, we are not being honest if we attribute its authorship.
When it is something among people, the students see the dishonesty clearly. If a student asks someone to do a job for him, it is clear to him that he has not done it. On the other hand, when he does it through some tool, the student feels that he did it himself. And that is where he does not distinguish that what it delivers is not actually his authorship, and should, in any case, be correctly referenced as the authorship of an AI.
We should not be against AI but rather teach our students to make full use of the AI tools that can contribute to their learning.