Transparency Is the New Originality
Lauren Bialystok (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education)

The arrival of ChatGPT unleashed chaos on academic assessment. Educators and scholars found some clarity in distinguishing between transparent and clandestine uses of generative AI. Where originality used to be the expectation for all academic work, AI-enhanced work is increasingly considered legitimate, up to a point, as long as the use of the technology is disclosed. The futile effort to ban AI is replaced with a more realistic standard for claiming academic credit: transparency. But does transparency about AI use offset the ethical concerns about students using it in submissions for assessment, or scholars using it in publications?

Lauren Bialystok is Associate Professor in Ethics at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. Her research spans topics in ethics, education, and identity; she has published on authenticity, social justice education, open-mindedness, sex education, high school philosophy, and the ethics of AI, among other topics. She is co-author (with Lisa Andersen) of Touchy Subject: The History and Philosophy of Sex Education (Chicago, 2022), which was the recipient of the AERA Outstanding Publication in Justice Award from the Philosophical Studies in Education SIG (2024), and co-editor (with Bruce Maxwell) of the six-volume anthology Educational Foundations (Bloomsbury, 2023).