The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus on June 26, 2025. Two professors at the university confronted students in their introductory data science course after receiving identical apology emails that were written by AI. — Anjali Pinto/The New York Times
Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.
But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had, according to the professors, Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo.
