Artificial intelligence is taking over education in all kinds of interesting and innovative ways, and not all of them are positive.
Scammers are enrolling AI bots in online courses at California community colleges, with the bots staying in the class just long enough to receive state and federal financial aid. The phenomenon has popped up in Alabama, Maryland, and South Carolina, but California is the headliner. In 2021, 20% of applications to California community colleges were fake, a result of loosened restrictions on financial aid and a shift to online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, AI advancements have led to around 34% of applications being fake.
In total, these AI bots stole more than $10 million in federal financial aid and more than $3 million in California aid from March 2023 to March 2024. In the last year, $10 million in California financial aid alone was stolen. And that 34% number for fake applications only counts the bots that get caught, meaning that the real percentage of fake students applying to California’s community colleges is even higher.
You can add it to the list of AI uses in education. Students are using it for everything from researching topics to straight-up cheating. AI chatbots serve as more advanced search engines in some cases, able to make research much easier for students. They can also be prompted to write assignments for students to plagiarize, ensuring that they learn nothing but how to cheat more effectively.
Teachers and instructors have similarly started using AI, both positively and negatively. Some teachers are using AI to create assignments, grade assignments, or tutor struggling students. Some also use AI tools to try to detect AI cheating from students, which is a problem, given that AI tools are not perfect and, of course, can hand out false positives. You can picture a scenario where a community college student gets falsely flagged for AI plagiarism while the AI bots in his online class continue to siphon financial aid money under the nose of the college and the government.
WIDESPREAD STUDENT USE OF AI NEEDS CODE OF CONDUCT: ‘TOO BIG TO IGNORE’
With AI scammers now abusing financial aid for universities and community colleges, you now have AI making an impact at just about every level of education. Even the supposed best students, such as those who graduate from law school, are not immune — there have now been multiple high-profile stories of lawyers whose filings cite court cases that do not exist. AI tools, which do have a habit of spitting out fabricated stories or events, have made up court cases that lazy lawyers haven’t bothered to check.
For better and for worse, AI isn’t going away in education any time soon. There may at least be a compromise to be reached here: We can have the AI financial aid scam bots take up the spots held by antisemites at Harvard and Columbia universities to help make higher education more inclusive and less hateful once and for all.