A new headache for honest students: Proving they didn’t use AI

Burrell, who was given a zero on an important assignment because of her professor’s suspicions that she had used AI to complete it, at the University of Houston-Downtown in Houston, Texas. Students are resorting to extreme measures to fend off accusations of cheating, including hourslong screen recordings of their homework sessions. — HOPE MORA/The New York Times

A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.

She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15% of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper – a mock cover letter – to an artificial intelligence chatbot.