‘Odd choices of words’: How an academic’s AI use was exposed by her peers

When a professor specialising in academic integrity wrote an opinion piece that defended universities against claims that artificial intelligence had downgraded the value of their qualifications, academic WhatsApp groups lit up.

Most academics are familiar with the language patterns generated by AI tools from marking student essays in the age of Claude and ChatGPT. “I knew as soon as I read the first paragraph,” one later remarked. The opinion piece was itself written with AI.

Western Sydney University acknowledged in response to enquiries that Professor Cath Ellis, a pro vice chancellor in quality and integrity, had used AI to write the article published by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Sunday, drawing on her previous research in the field.

It argued that students should hold faith with the higher education system, and was submitted in response to an earlier piece by Macquarie University’s Kylie Moore-Gilbert that argued universities were committing “widespread industrial fraud” by accepting money from students and giving them degrees that they did not earn.

But Ellis denied that her piece was written “by” AI. “It was written with AI, and there’s a really big difference there,” she said.

She said she wrote down some thoughts on the train coming into work and then asked AI assistant Copilot to pull them into a coherent structure.

“I think of it very much as a sort of member of my team,” she said. “I really do feel that it’s allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on what really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking … rather than spending a lot of my time writing sentences from scratch.”

Academics pointed to several giveaways that Ellis’s piece was written by AI, including instances where three verbs or concepts are listed together, known as the rule-of-threes.

Moore-Gilbert said her suspicions were raised by the overuse of short, declarative sentences such as: “It is not this. It is that.” She also noticed a large amount of unnecessary jargon that did not make sense when it was drilled down.

“For instance, the repetition of ‘to assure learning’ or ‘artefact’ to me seemed odd choices of words in the context they were used,” Moore-Gilbert said.

The incident exposes the differing norms in the use of AI between institutions and industries.

WSU has embraced AI and encourages its students and academics to use it. A spokesperson for the university said Ellis’s use of the technology was “sophisticated and appropriate” and reflected WSU’s “institutional position of human-centred AI”.

“To write her opinion article, Professor Ellis