In a high-tech collegiate nightmare, a student was falsely accused of using artificial intelligence to cheat on a paper and then forced to defend her name during a school investigation. As Rolling Stone reports, Louise Stivers, a graduating senior at the University of California Davis, had a paper flagged by plagiarism-checking software Turnitin, which landed her in hot water with the school’s administration. “I was, like, freaking out,” she told the magazine. With no outside support, Stivers was forced to defend herself and prove that she hadn’t used an AI chatbot to write her paper, adding to the stress of finishing her last semester of school. Even her grades began to slip as a result, she argued. The incident highlights the significant flaws of tools like Turnitin, and how they are increasingly being used to falsely accuse students of using AI to cheat in the classroom. “It was definitely very demotivating,” the 21-year-old political science student told Rolling Stone, calling the entire debacle a “huge waste of time” that could have been spent “doing homework and studying for midterms” — and working on her applications to law school to boot. Stivers later learned, as Rolling Stone notes, that she wasn’t even the only UC Davis student wrongfully accused of cheating based on AI-detection software. Just a few days before being subjected to her academic integrity review earlier this year, USA Today published a similar story centering on senior history major William Quarterman, whose professor failed him and wrongfully accused him of plagiarism after…AI Plagiarism Detection Software Keeps Falsely Accusing Students of Cheating