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.
The students got their comeuppance in a large lecture hall on Oct. 17, when the professors read aloud their identical, less-than-genuine apologies from a projector screen, video from that class showed. Busted. The professors posted about it on social media, where the gotcha moment drew widespread attention.
“They said, ‘Dear Professor Flanagan, I want to sincerely apologize,’” Professor Flanagan said. “And I was like, Thank you. They’re owning up to it. They’re apologizing. And then I got another email, the second email, and then the third. And then everybody sort of sincerely apologizing, and suddenly it became a little less sincere.”