Dartmouth’s provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job

Despite the scandal, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock wants more AI. (She wrote a piece for The Atlantic in September called “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth.”) What’s crucial, though, is that the school’s leaders should “hold themselves to the highest standards,” she said. This appears to mean one main thing: disclosure.

In announcing Schnell’s resignation, Beilock wrote that “each of us brings a different perspective on how and when to incorporate AI into our work and our lives. Moreover, keeping Dartmouth at the forefront of AI inevitably means leading through an environment that is fluid and fast-changing. That is why, as leaders, it is so critical that we model the transparency and human judgment that we expect from our students and scholars.”

Who wrote this?

What does “disclosure” mean? In a September 2026 paper on AI detection tools, called “Who Wrote This?”, Schnell himself goes to great lengths to argue that “human-written” or “AI-written” is far too simple a binary. In his view, everything will become a mix of human judgment and AI work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The key for him is that the human author takes full responsibility for the text, however it was composed and edited.

In the paper, Schnell lays out his method for producing it. It’s worth quoting at some length:

In September 2026, I asked OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Pro whether an AI-written essay could ever be identified with certainty, and I suggested connecting the problem to Turing’s imitation game and to the “reverse” Turing test posed by AI-text detection. GPT-5.6 Pro connected the question to binary hypothesis testing and statistical decision theory, proposed early structures and titles, identified candidate literature, and generated portions of early drafts. I chose the problem, journal, audience, and eventual direction of the argument. I decided which examples and results should remain central, including the decision to retain the Liang study while confronting it with important counterevidence. I checked the cited literature, rejected or corrected claims that I judged inaccurate, corrected mathematical and conceptual errors, and reorganized the argument.

In revising the manuscript, I rewrote most sections and added substantial explanations. I occasionally asked GPT-5.6 Sol to provide language-editing assistance for sections I had rewritten. I created the figures and made the final decisions about the mathematics, interpretation, sources, organization, and wording. I take full responsibility for the resulting manuscript.

Before submitting the manuscript for publication, I also asked GPT-5.6 Pro and Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 to review it critically and identify issues that reviewers might raise. I evaluated the issues they identified and made corrections where I judged them warranted.

Despite all this assistance, Schnell resists the idea that AI is a “co-author.” Instead, he writes, “Calling [the paper] ‘coauthored’ would introduce a different confusion. Mathematical tools have long made substantive contributions without thereby becoming authors… The point is not that the software contributed nothing. It is that contribution and authorship are different roles.”

Source: arstechnica.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.