Tales of Temptation: Staff and student reflections on AI and dishonesty in the neoliberal academy

Abstract

The university's experience with AI is a turbulent zone between trust, panic and fascination. Some universities are updating their guidelines to better advise staff and students on ‘acceptable’ ways to collaborate with AI, while others are looking for strategies to restrict AI in their classrooms. At the heart of this unsettling debate are staff and students who are inserted into a growing discourse of ‘cheating culture’. We believe that any discussion in this area would be incomplete without understanding staff’s and students’ lived experiences and reflections on AI. Using social fiction, an arts-based method, this chapter explores how students and staff make sense of and deal with this increasingly complex realm of AI as well as the emotional stress, issues of inequality and ethical concerns they face