More and more students in the UK are getting caught using AI to cheat on assignments, according to a new survey by The Guardian.
During 2023 and 2024, almost 7,000 students in UK universities were found to have used AI to cheat.
The Guardian said that meant five in every 1,000 students had been caught cheating, but it said the number of people using the software to cheat is likely to be much higher.
The newspaper got data about cheating from 131 universities, although not every university recorded its data in the same way.
Not all of them distinguished between cheating using AI and other types of cheating — copying parts of text from a book, for example.
Based on data from up to May this year, the number of students using AI to cheat is still increasing, the survey found.
Schools and colleges around the world have had to think fast about how to deal with AI, with students using the software to help with assignments.
As schools work to find ways of using AI to catch people who cheat, students are finding new ways to get around those systems — and it’s getting harder to prove that AI has been used.
Online, it’s easy to find sites that say they can “humanize” AI-generated text.
Some people have suggested that more assignments should be done in person to prevent cheating, but this isn’t always possible or useful.
On its own, using AI as a tool to help with assignments is not cheating — students report turning to the software to summarize long texts or to pick out key points.
In the end, universities and schools may have to rely on students’ integrity when it comes to the use of AI. Thomas Lancaster from Imperial College London told The Guardian: “My hope is that students are still learning through this process.”
