View / My reporting prompted Dartmouth provost to resign. It wasn’t the right call - Semafor

In August, I wrote about the use of AI in guest columns published in major news outlets, including by Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell. This week, he resigned.

The thing is, he shouldn’t have lost his job.

Schnell’s was one of 50 guest columns that included AI-generated text that were published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post over a one-month period. An (AI-assisted) analysis showed that AI use in writing has become incredibly common, even in publications that prohibit it.

My hope was that the reporting would lead to some smart questions, not a shame-and-blame witch hunt that would result in a resignation: Does it make sense to have a blanket ban on something that has become so prevalent and can fool some of the world’s most renowned editors? Will that even be technically possible in the future?

If the Dartmouth provost did anything wrong, it was failing to disclose that he used AI in the process of writing columns and academic journal articles for publications that prohibit its use. But it appears all of Schnell’s writing was based on his own ideas and work. He didn’t just prompt a chatbot and pass the output off as his own.

“I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text,” Schnell told The Dartmouth newspaper, which did its own investigation into more of Schnell’s work.

I get why students are mad, and why Schnell’s resignation might seem appropriate. Students are often prohibited from using AI in class and subject to punishment if they’re caught.

But forced resignations just perpetuate the current situation, where we are fighting against a current of technology use that’s become so commonplace it’s impossible to fight. Years from now, we’ll look back on this time with regret and wonder why we were so outraged by people using a new tool that was so obviously useful.

“If true, Provost Schnell’s use of AI in academic publications is arguably a graver violation,” Eli Moyse, a columnist for Dartmouth’s student newspaper, wrote in an op-ed.

“He repeatedly outsourced his intellectual labor and then tried to pass off work that wasn’t his under his name. Even if it wasn’t human work, passing work that is not your own off under your name still constitutes clear plagiarism — probably the very worst academic violation a faculty member can commit.”