Artificial intelligence is a tool.

However, it can also be a crutch. One student is not happy that she is paying for education from an instructor who relies too much on AI, especially when the instructor prohibits students from using it.

A senior student at Northeastern University, Ella Stapleton, demanded a tuition refund of over $8,000 after she determined that her business professor, Rick Arrowood, had covertly used AI tools (e.g., OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and the presentation generator Gamma) to generate lecture notes and course materials.

This was particularly contentious because the course syllabus explicitly prohibited students from using AI tools for their assignments, a rule the professor himself was not following.