Does Using AI to Edit an Op-Ed on Students' Math Skills Undermine the Argument?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math…
A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, named Zvezdelina Stankova, wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard expressing concern over a severe deficiency in students' math skills. Her op-ed detailed how students were five to eight years behind and lacked a middle school education in fundamental areas such as fractions and basic algebra.
Stankova attributed this decline to the University of California's decision to adopt test-blind admissions, which eliminated standardized tests like the SAT and ACT that previously served as benchmarks for evaluating applicant preparedness for Berkeley-level coursework.
Upon publication, the op-ed raised questions regarding the role of artificial intelligence in its creation. The Berkeley Daily Californian, the university's student newspaper, noticed the language in the op-ed appeared to have been edited with AI. After running the piece through AI detection software Pangram, they found that 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by AI.
In response to these findings, Stankova admitted she had used AI to assist in editing the piece, but she emphasized that the article was the result of hundreds of person-hours of intensive human work. According to Stankova, approximately 80 hours were contributed by herself, with the rest of the work done by her colleagues. The op-ed itself, she stated, was the outcome of extensive original analysis, research, and expertise from the team involved.
The San Francisco Standard, the outlet that published Stankova's op-ed, responded to the AI detection findings by asserting that while AI may assist, their expectation is always that humans are behind every article they publish. They maintain that this op-ed reflects Stankova's and her colleagues' extensive original analysis, research, and expertise.
The controversy surrounding the use of AI in writing the op-ed has sparked a debate about whether the use of artificial intelligence should be entirely avoided in academic writing or if it should be considered as a tool that enhances rather than detracts from the argument being presented.
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