UWI adopts AI tool amid fears of false accusations

The University of the West Indies is introducing software to detect academic cheating involving artificial intelligence, but an information technology specialist has warned that false accusations could unfairly punish students whose work is original.

The UWI has partnered with the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) to introduce IntegraGuard across its campuses this academic year, a system designed to help verify the integrity of student work amid the growing use of artificial intelligence.

But UWI Cave Hill principal Professor Clive Landis told Barbados TODAY the university’s approach is not simply about policing AI: “How do we as a university use AI in our teaching and learning? Well, we have an AI policy, and it states very clearly that we want our students to be very AI literate. We want them to use it, to know how to use it.”

At the same time, Professor Landis acknowledged the need to protect the integrity of the university’s degrees, pointing to a range of assessment methods, including interviews, presentations and in-person examinations, alongside software designed to identify possible misuse.

“With all of these ways we can ensure the integrity and we have very robust mechanisms, but we’re also using the most advanced software and applications in our ability to try and keep up in the arms race.”

Professor Landis described IntegraGuard as “a really extremely good integrity verification tool”, but said one of its features was particularly important because it focuses on rewarding students rather than simply catching them.

“They have this tool called Origin, and it actually rewards originality,” he said.

Professor Landis explained that the system could assess work as it was being produced and, where it determined that the material was original, provide a certificate recognising the student’s intellectual ownership.

“If a student is writing, let’s say, a poem, as they’re writing, the AI instrument will tell them, based on all the knowledge in the world today, what you have written is completely original.

“There will actually be a certificate applied to it so that you have intellectual ownership of what you have just written, so it rewards originality.”

He added: “Instead of just going on the negative side, let’s go on the positive side, let’s reward originality.”

Technology Minister Senator Jonathan Reid agreed that universities needed to guard against plagiarism and students simply using AI to produce work they passed off as their own.

“I think the education system has always been very concerned, and it should be always very concerned about plagiarism and people just lifting other people’s information and not doing their own work and passing it off as theirs.”

But Senator Reid said the technology should also force educators to rethink what learning and assessment could look like in an AI-driven environment: “How can you actually make it more challenging? How can you actually make it more enriching to utilise the tools that were never previously available, so that my ability to learn a new topic or understand more deeply goes even further?”  

AI could allow students to develop more dynamic projects and create “products and systems that actually are now highly valuable in a way that you could never have imagined before”, he suggested.

“Obviously you have to protect the integrity of the education system and utilising tools to be able to do that, but I really am looking forward to them going to the next stage.”

But information technology consultant Steven Williams said the push to use AI to police AI must be approached cautiously.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” he warned.

Williams said the biggest concern was what could happen when AI-detection systems get it wrong: “If you keep hearing that AI is not perfect, what happens to the student who submits a project that’s legitimately theirs and through a false positive, it says that this is an AI promoted piece?”  

While welcoming the UWI’s efforts to identify students who were “blatantly using AI to circumvent the educational process”, he questioned how institutions would protect students whose genuine work was incorrectly flagged.

“My thing is that you don’t want to disenfranchise those people who’ve submitted good work.”

(SB)