Emory Univesity Suspends Students Over AI Study Tool The School Gave Them $10k To Build And Promoted

I’ll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it’s so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this means a great deal of consternation over concerns about students using these tools to cheat. While these concerns sure seem wildly overblown, the flipside of this issue has been the use of all kinds of software tools billed as “anti-cheating” programs for schools to use to make sure students are student-ing legitimately.

But, man, whatever the hell is going on with the folks at Emory University is simply bizzare. A group of students are suing the school after being suspended for a year over an AI program they built called “Eightball,” which is designed to automagically review course study material within the school’s software where professors place those study materials and develop flashcards, study materials for review, and the like. The only problem is that the school not only knew all about Eightball, it paid these same students $10,000 to make it.

Last spring, the students presented Eightball at the university’s “Entrepreneurship Summit” and were given a $10,000 grand prize to build and launch their software, which allowed students to upload PDFs of course readings, syllabuses, and other material and turn those into practice tests and flash cards. They also explained that they were eventually going to allow users to connect to Canvas, which is a software platform used by the university where professors upload course readings, documentation, assignments, etc, the lawsuit alleges. “By connecting Eightball to Canvas, students would be able to import their course materials to Eightball all at once rather than uploading the same documents individually.”

“Eightball is a platform kind of like ChatGPT but trained directly on your Canvas courses. The way Eightball works is it connects to your Canvas and goes through each of your courses. And for each course it studies the modules, the lectures, the slides, the readings, everything. From there, it becomes a ChatGPT-like experience, but the AI is customized for your course,” one of the creators explains in a demo video. The student then shows that Eightball surfaces directly relevant passages and serves as, more or less, a search-engine for class material.

The school actually did much more than just fund Eightball’s creation. It promoted the tool on its website. It announced how awesome the tool is on LinkedIn. Emails from faculty at Emory showered the creators of Eightball with all kinds of praise, including from the Associate Dean of the school. Everything was great, all of this was above-board, and it seemed that these Emory students were well on their way to doing something special, with the backing of the university.

Then the school’s IT and Honor Council got involved.

It is not clear, exactly, what changed at Emory that made the university take action against a startup that it went out of its way to promote, but both the lawsuit and the Honor Council writeup asserts that the university’s IT department was angry that the company allowed students to connect their own Canvas API tokens to the app. In the lawsuit, the students’ lawyers write that the university changed the settings within Canvas and “hid the button that generates Canvas [API] tokens, but it did not inform [the students] that the change was in response to Eightball’s newly available method for uploading course materials.” Soon after this, “Emory informed [one of the students] that he may have violated Emory’s Undergraduate Code of Conduct by Connecting Eightball to Canvas.” The students shut Eightball down at this point.

After all of this promotion, the university’s Honor Council launched an investigation into the students and Eightball. This investigation, which can be read here, found that Eightball had not been used for cheating, and that the students had not lied about the capabilities of the software. It also did not dispute that the school both funded and championed the software. The council recommended that the students be suspended for a year, anyway. Jason Ciejka, the director of the school’s honor council, wrote “this case is unprecedented in terms of its scale and potential to harm the Emory community.” 

Read that second paragraph again. The school funded the creation of this tool made by its own students, praised those students and promoted the use of the tool, validated that it had not been used for any cheating (because it can’t be used to cheat, more on that later), and then suspended the students for a year anyway. That’s insane.

And all of this consternation over using an API token by students is equally silly. The school suggested this was some kind of IT security risk for students to use them to connect Canvas to Eightball. What the school appears to be missing is that, you know, that’s precisely what APIs are for.

The school “figured out that the Eightball program accesses the Canvas data through the Canvas user generated token, which is essentially users’ Emory credentials that give full access to everything users can access on Canvas. This user generated token is considered a highly restricted user credential tool and sharing it to any outside party is a violation of Canvas terms and IT policies.” API tokens are sensitive, but API tokens exist exclusively for users to connect accounts to outside services—what the Honor Council is describing is essentially the only use for an API token, and is a feature of Canvas which the Honor Council wrote “is not something that they can turn off.” Canvas’s own documentation explains to students how they can use use API tokens to connect their accounts to other apps: “Access tokens provide access to canvas resources through the Canvas API. Access tokens can be generated automatically for third-party applications or created manually.”

The Honor Council, however, seemed to be hyper-focused on cheating, still. While it confirmed no cheating had taken place, it still recommended suspension due to how Eightball could be used for cheating. Except no, no it cannot. That isn’t what the platform does at all. The only information Eightball can supply the student with is the information that is in the course material supplied by the professors themselves.

According to Eightball’s marketing, the lawsuit, and Emory University’s own writeups, Eightball was not actually a cheating tool. As far as AI-tools go, it seems innocuous, and the university did not provide any examples of the tool ever being used for cheating. “Unless answers are directly in the course materials, Eightball cannot make up anything for non-existing answers.”

You can read the lawsuit from the students embedded below, but I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario in which the court doesn’t laugh Emory University out of the courtroom and order it to return these students to their classes.