College is supposed to be a place for students to express and share their innovative and authentic ideas. But what happens when students use AI for projects like photography and writing?
Now, a clear line must be drawn: How can students utilize advancing AI without losing academic integrity?
One argument for AI could be help with menial assignments. Students paying out of pocket must budget their money and make sacrifices to make sure their payments are met. For those stressing about school-work-life balance, AI may be a helpful feature for last-minute projects and assignments.
However, other students who value authenticity and commit to studying hard may see AI as an unfair advantage. That creates tension between people on both sides of the argument, causing relationships to become strained and difficult to build.
“When students rely on AI to skip foundational learning, crucial skills atrophy. Yes, students are using AI to write essays, ace take-home tests and breeze through homework with the elegance of someone who definitely didn’t read The Scarlet Letter,” Catherine Goetze, a contributor of TIME’s “The Real Reason Students Are Using AI to Avoid Learning,” said.
“That behavior means many are skipping foundational learning opportunities. Skills like structuring arguments, developing a point of view and sitting with a hard, frustrating task long enough to figure it out are muscles that atrophy when AI becomes the shortcut.”
Jake Bell, a senior sports communication major who dreams of becoming a producer or technical director for a sports team, remembers how parents had to research topics before technology came along.
“[Our parents] had to rely on using the library,” Bell said, “reading books and doing everything handwritten. Now, all of a sudden, it’s kind of shifted to AI. I feel like that could be true in some ways.”
Danny Herz, also a senior, who loves to express himself through visual storytelling, explains his view from a photography major-standpoint.
“If you’re editing a photo, your first thought would be to go to AI and have AI fix it,” Hertz said. “Before digital, we’d be in a dark room. You would have to know a certain kind of process or technique to fix a certain mistake. I think AI is going to change how we think, how we solve problems and how we form relationships.”
According to the 2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog, the Academic Integrity Policy states that students are at all times required to “acknowledge the sources of words, ideas, performances, compositions, or images that are borrowed, including those that are quoted, paraphrased, or used as inspiration.”
While AI can cite proper sources, it can also “hallucinate” information by making things up on the fly. Any image can be generated without issue — the factor of it pulling from fake sources can put one’s academic integrity at risk.
Assistant Provost Sarah Perrier, Ph.D., says that faculty are held to the same standards. “Our current policies reflect the trust we put in their expertise,” she said. “The speed of AI does open new options for teachers, too, when it comes to answering students’ questions. Imagine that I’m a teacher who has three examples I prepared to share with my students, but I need a fourth one. It’s good to know AI could have my back if I needed to illustrate something in the moment.”
Bell thinks that AI can be used as a tool and a shortcut.
“Some students may use it as a shortcut for an assignment,” Bell said. “It’s due in an hour, they had put it off until the last minute, then they decided to use AI. Sometimes I like to use it to my advantage. I’m a big baseball stats guy, so I’ll use AI to find advanced stats that I could use.”
Herz agrees.
“A lot of people are seeing it as a tool. It can be seen as a new medium,” Herz said. “There’s a museum in LA, I forget what it’s called, but it’s basically the first AI art museum. Despite me not wanting to admit this, the art was insane. It was beautiful. And if you try to recreate that as someone who does not know how to do AI art at all, it’s going to be very hard to [replicate] it. AI is not going to replace creativity. It’s going to change how we are creative.”
As AI continues to increase, it will also continue to integrate into people’s lives. Self-control and holding oneself accountable is important. Therefore, we must continue into this new era carefully.
