— An education technology expert has warned lecturers at the University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus against treating AI detection scores as proof that a student used artificial intelligence to write an assignment.

Dr. Joseph South, chief innovation officer at ISTE, said the tools have not been shown to identify AI-written work consistently. He made the comments during a public lecture and question-and-answer session at the campus.

“They do not work,” South said when asked about best practices for AI detectors. “There’s no AI detector that’s been proven to work consistently.”

UWI Five Islands principal Professor Justin Robinson described watching a colleague submit a paper he had written in 2015 to Turnitin. Robinson said the paper received an AI score above 80%, despite having been written years before the current generation of AI writing tools became available.

South said a detector result could be considered as one step when a lecturer has concerns about an assignment, but should not settle the question on its own.

The issue also arose when a lecturer asked how universities could maintain trust if teachers suspected students of relying heavily on AI while students believed lecturers were using it to prepare assignments. South said AI has made it possible to produce polished final papers quickly, weakening the assumption that a finished assignment necessarily shows what a student has learned.

He urged universities to put more weight on the work students do along the way, including how they develop and explain their ideas.

“I think we need to shift our assessment methods to be more about the process than the product,” South said.

South also called for open discussions about how both lecturers and students use AI. Clear expectations, he said, could help address suspicion on both sides while allowing students to learn when the technology is useful and when they must do the thinking themselves.

This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: AI Expert Warns UWI Five Islands Against Relying on AI Detectors to Accuse Students.