Haishan Yang, a student of the University of Minnesota, is seeking more than $1.3 million in damages and reversal of expulsion, after the school expelled him for allegedly using AI.
The 33-year-old has taken legal action, claiming the accusations placed towards him are untrue, labelling it as a ‘’conspiracy concocted by his professors.’’
The student enrolled for a PhD, but was expelled last year, after he was accused of using AI generated tools to write up his essays.
As part of the exam, students are required to write three essays over the duration of 8 hours. Notes, reports and books are all allowed, but AI tools are prohibited.
Accusations of the student came into light when all four of the faculty graders suspected the paper was not written by a student. They expressed concerns over the fact that the answers appeared irrelevant or were not covered during Yang’s classes. Additionally, the use of acronyms not commonly used in the field, but commonly appeared in answers generated by ChatGPT were also present in the students’ paper.
Moreover, two of the instructors gave the essay questions to ChatGPT in order to compare its output with Yang's answers. To their astonishment, they found the AI's formatting, structure, language, and content extremely alike!
"I was struck by the similarities between the two that seemed extremely unlikely to be coincidental," wrote Professor Peter Huckfeldt in a letter to the hearing committee.
In his argument, Yang claims that Open AI’s tool was using the same reference material than him. He also accused the professors of editing the ChatGPT responses so that they would appear more like his answers! Adding that methods used to detect AI usage are generally biased and unreliable, especially against people whose first language is not English.
The panel on the other hand, criticized Yang for not including sufficient citations as well as having "inconsistencies" in his testimony.
The professor’s also revealed that Yang had used AI for previous assignments, to which he was given a warning but no punishment. Yang admitted to using AI ‘’only to check his English [but] not to generate answers.’’
Bryan Dowd, Yang's academic advisor, expressed that he was "the best-read student" he ever encountered. "In over four decades…I never have seen this level of animosity directed at a student. I have no explanation for that animosity," he added.
Yang appealed the decision to take legal action and won, despite the graduate director telling him to ‘simply quit.’ The school has since apologized and agreed to restart his funding if he didn't sue them.
However, Yang has since filed both state and federal lawsuits against his professor and the University of Minnesota. He is seeking $575,000 in damages in the federal lawsuit and $760,000 in the defamation case. He is also demanding a public apology and wants his expulsion reversed.
The federal lawsuit includes a request for $200,000 from the university "to deter future procedural violations and uphold fairness in disciplinary proceedings." The University has denied Yang's appeal.
Ironically, Yang said he used ChatGPT to write the lawsuit filings!
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