Their Professors Caught Them Cheating. They Used A.I. to Apologize.

October 30, 2025

a picture of a laptop

(New York Times) – Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said they grew suspicious after receiving identical apologies from dozens of students they had accused of academic dishonesty.

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had, according to the professors, Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo. (Read More)