Does Emory University really not get how technology works?
Lawyer picks the wrong week to pitch the story of a mean University and AI
While people who make a living writing hot takes about AI were blowing their minds on the collision of their favorite CEO and an A-List movie star,
and 404 Media were breaking a story about Emory University and the challenges facing higher education when it comes to generative AI. I have to say, my friends at Emory caught a break that attention is elsewhere.Based on a lawsuit filed in Atlanta federal court, the story has the promising hook of Emory rewarding a student who built an AI study tool with a $10,000 prize and then suspending him for cheating. Looks like yet another case of higher ed just not getting it.
If Emory University were a person, we could say that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. But a research university is a complex and powerful bureaucracy with many, many hands. What happened was that the hand of a business school pitch competition prize committee gaveth and the hand of the student honor council tooketh away. A group of students were awarded some money for a cool product idea and then punished when other students started using that study tool as designed.
Did Emory do that? Sure. But to understand why something that appears so contradictory happened, you need to understand that, like Walt Whitman, Emory contains multitudes. The story assumes that Emory is a single thing. It is not. No university is. As Clark Kerr argued, modern universities are better thought of as multiversities. And gosh, do I feel for the people at Emory Multiversity dealing with this issue.
To start with, I feel for the student, although it is important to know that so far, the story is based on what his lawyer presented in court. On the surface, the story seems pretty unfair to the student. Read the complaint, though, and complexity emerges. The facts are there: In March 2023, the plaintiff was awarded a prize for Eightball, the name of the study aid they pitched. Eightball was featured in EmoryBusiness.com, the house communication organ for Emory’s Goizueta Business School, in a June 2023 article that was later removed. In November 2023, he was informed that the honor council was considering charges for violations “related to the development of a generative AI tool that potentially exposes Canvas data to a third party and may be used by students to complete assignments in violation of the Undergraduate Academic Honor Code.”
One key argument of the complaint is that the history major didn’t do it. The coder did. I’m predisposed to like history majors, but this seems….a little icky?
Seems bad, right? The complaint makes a big deal about the contradiction between the celebration in March and the gut-wrenching notice in November. It appears that when a hearing was held, the student was able to make the hands aware of one another, or at least make sure that the hand meting out justice was aware that recently another hand had been patting him on the back. But whose back? There are at least two students involved.
The cofounders were the plaintiff, who I will not name as 404 Media did not, and the plaintiff’s partner, whom the complaint calls “Emory student 1.” They were charged together, found to have violated the honor code, and punished with expulsion, which was reduced on appeal to a one-semester suspension for each. Emory student 1 is not part of the complaint, so presumably, he was either willing to take his suspension quietly or will be filing his own lawsuit. The complaint does more than a bit of shoving at the bus stop. Emory student 1 is described as the technical brains of the operation, while the plaintiff is a history major with a “strictly marketing-focused role.”
This is a fairly typical arrangement among student software developers. A business or liberal arts major provides soft skills and a computer science major codes. Often, the teams are bigger, typically with more coders and fewer marketing-focused roles. One key argument of the complaint is that the history major didn’t do it. The coder did. I’m predisposed to like history majors who cofound edtech companies, but this seems….a little icky? You see, he didn’t build the thing that allegedly violated the honor code. He just convinced his fellow Emory students to use it. So, his (former?) friend should take the fall.
The complaint, which, again, is the story of one student who is trying to get out of this with the argument that he was just the marketer, is a little vague on the specifics, but it sure seems like there were shenanigans.
The core of the issue seems to be hacking, not cheating. Eightball encouraged students at Emory to let the application use API tokens to access their Canvas course sites and download all the course material. Then, Eightball’s generative AI turned that material into study aids. An API token is tied to a student’s login credentials so that it provides access only to the materials the student could access by logging into Canvas. A tech-savvy student could write a script and use the Canvas API token to download all her course materials, feed those into a foundation model, and then prompt the model to be her study buddy. Or, she could have Eightball do that for her. Except that, generally speaking, letting unknown third-party applications, even one developed by prize-winning students, access your learning management system is frowned upon.
The complaint, which, again, is the story of one student who is trying to get out of this with the argument that he was just the marketer, is a little vague on the specifics, but it sure seems like there were shenanigans. When the IT staff became aware of a third-party application using the API, they took measures that the complaint describes as hiding “the button that generates Canvas [API] tokens,” whatever that means. Emory student 1 “developed a workaround so users could continue linking their Canvas portfolios to Eightball.” So, he updated Eightball so that it would work around a barrier that the system administrators put in place to limit third-party access. The complaint argues that no one informed the students that hiding the button “was in response to Eightball’s newly available method for uploading course materials.” It is not at all clear if Emory had any way of telling who was doing the hacking.
This is not exactly Kevin Mitnick, but it isn’t “I got kicked out of school because of an AI Detector’s false positive,” either. This webpage saying don't let third-party applications use your Canvas API token is probably a case of Emory slamming the barn door shut, but even if there was no clear statement about not giving your Canvas API token to third parties at the time, Eightball, the third party in question, was playing cat and mouse with Emory’s IT staff. Winning a prize for a software product idea is not permission to hack a school’s learning management system.
The circumstances are murky enough that we should all reserve judgment. But it seems clear that this is not a case of a clueless university being clueless about AI. The moral panic swirling about generative AI can make it difficult for administrators, teachers, and students to determine right from wrong or figure out appropriate sanctions when there is a finding that rules were violated. The appropriate response, I think, is some sympathy for all involved. Now, let me grab some popcorn and go back to Sama and ScarJo. Wouldn’t it be great if they started dating? What a plot twist!
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