If students in Joseph Reagle’s Communication in the Digital Age class last spring planned to have Claude or ChatGPT do their assignments, they found out early in the semester it might not go well. Reagle told everyone that, among other checks, he planned to run their writing through an artificial intelligence detector called Pangram.
Reagle, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology research engineer who’d been a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University for 15 years, had recently discovered AI misuse by students almost by mistake. He’d assigned another class to contribute to Wikipedia, telling them the work had to be substantively their own and not a chatbot’s. But Wiki Education, a nonprofit helping with the assignment, used Pangram to review the submissions and detected multiple apparent violations of Wikipedia’s ban on AI content. Some students seemed to have just copied and pasted AI output.