Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell is facing a bit of a reckoning right now after being busted for using AI to write articles that were published in newspapers and academic journals — with some students calling for him to be fired.
The accusations first came from a broader Semafor investigation published last month that looked into how many guest opinion pieces in the US’s top newspapers were written with AI. One of Schnell’s columns in The Washington Post, when put through the widely-cited AI detector Pangram, came up as 100 percent AI-written. The article’s topic, in a detail rich with irony, was AI cheating in colleges.
That sparked a follow-up investigation by the university’s student-run paper, The Dartmouth, which examined Schnell’s published work before and after the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Using Pangram, it found that all his works written before that date all came up as 100 percent human written, while a selection of nine of his published works after that date came up with a median score of 96 percent AI written.
In a statement to The Dartmouth, Schnell fessed up to using chatbots in his writing process, though he still claimed ultimate authorship over his manuscripts and insisted that AI only had a modest influence on the final product, using it solely for tweaks like “language refinement” and copyediting.
