Black Students Are Disproportionately Falsely Accused Of Using AI To Cheat, Black Educators Want To Know Why
The Trump administration and billionaire tech CEOs across the country are working overtime to convince us that the advent of artificial intelligence is the future, the present, and the answer to staying competitive on a global scale. Meanwhile, polls have indicated that more than half the educators who were surveyed are concerned that AI makes it harder for people to think for themselves, and one of the many reasons President Donald Trump’s approval rating is so abysmally low is due to his policies and executive orders aimed at promoting and deregulating AI technology. In fact, a recent YouGov poll found 63% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, and 73% “say they do not trust AI to make ethical decisions.”
Then there’s the impact on Black people and Black communities, as tech CEOs build their data centers in underserved Black neighborhoods and promise the locals, who now have high energy bills and unclean drinking water, that it’s going to start raining jobs any day now. AI facial recognition technology has been disproportionately weaponized against Black people, whom it often misidentifies, resulting in unjust targeting by law enforcement.
And that’s not the only way AI has been weaponized to reinforce racism and implicit racial bias; that discrimination is also making its way into the classroom. In fact, in 2024, a study found that Black students were more likely to be accused of using AI to cheat than their white counterparts. More than twice as likely, in fact.
The poll by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that examines the impact of technology on young people, found that Black students are more than twice as likely as their white or Hispanic peers to have their writing incorrectly flagged as AI-generated.
From Education Weekly:
Overall, about 10 percent of teens of any background said they had their work inaccurately identified as generated by an AI tool, Common Sense found.
But 20 percent of Black teens were falsely accused of using AI to complete an assignment, compared with 7 percent of white and 10 percent of Latino teens.
This may be at least partially due to flaws in AI detection software. About 79 percent of teens who had their assignments incorrectly flagged by a teacher also had their work submitted to AI detection software, while 27 percent said their work had not been submitted.
The study inspired Taylor McGee, assistant professor at Christopher Newport University, to launch her own investigative research into why Black students are being wrongly accused of cheating with AI. The Black educator’s forthcoming study is titled Authorship, Assumption, and Equity: How AI Shapes Teachers’ Perceptions of Black Student Work, and, according to USC Rossier, was recently awarded a grant from the Spencer Foundation.
From USC Rossier:
The two-year study will examine how current and preservice teachers think about and respond to students’ use of AI for schoolwork. For McGee, researching the potential academic and psychological harms to Black students that incidents like this cause is central to her why she entered the field of education in the first place. And the opportunity to influence educational practice and policy that could change how teachers interact with Black students is “the heart of why I’m doing this career,” she says.
This is not a new phenomenon for Black students. “We know a lot about how Black students are penalized and pushed out of schools for things that are cultural expressions—Black girls receiving out-of-school suspensions for their choice of physical expression, including hairstyles and clothing, engaging in the cultural tradition of call-and-response,” McGee says. These types of punishments can not only impact academic outcomes but are also related to higher levels of unemployment, fewer job prospects, reduced salaries and the school-to-prison pipeline, McGee explains.
Interestingly enough, though, the same administration that is pushing and promoting AI also implemented policies to block research on such racial discrimination in the classroom. In fact, last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order discouraging school administrators from using “disparate impact” data to address racial disparities in disciplinary actions taken against students, labeling it a DEI practice. He also signed an executive order that required federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), to stop using “disparate impact” data to identify discriminatory policies and practices that disproportionately harm Black people and people of color in general.
Anyway, according to a survey of 460 sixth to 12th-grade public school teachers conducted for the Center for Democracy & Technology, around 68% of teachers reported using an AI detection tool regularly, and Black Americans aren’t the only ones impacted by it. The U.S.’s immigrant communities are impacted as well.
More from Education Weekly:
But the tools often reflect societal biases. Researchers ran essays written by Chinese students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, through seven widely-used detectors. They did the same with a sample of essays written by U.S. 8th graders who were native English speakers.
The tools incorrectly labeled more than half of the TOEFL essays as AI-generated, while accurately classifying the 8th grade essays as human-crafted.
Ironically, AI appears to be exhibiting all the same biases against Black people, people of color, and immigrants that those groups experience just living in a human society, which could lead some to believe the disproportionate negative impact it has is by design, not just an unfortunate side-effect of progress.
SEE ALSO: