Over the last few months, the number of emails and phone calls I have received about professors accusing students of using AI has skyrocketed. While this new area of academic misconduct is still developing, there have been a few patterns that I have seen. In the next coming posts, I’m going to discuss some of the things that I have seen that professors are citing as “proof” that a student used AI to complete their assignment.
Curly vs Straight Quotation Marks
Something that I have seen being cited repeatedly is the use of “curly” vs. “straight” quotation marks and apostrophes. It seems that AI systems like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini produce work using straight quotation marks. Conversely, most word processing programs like Google Docs and Microsoft Word use the curly style of quotation marks and apostrophes. Apparently, one reason why AI uses the straight variety is because AI models are trained on massive amounts of text data, which can include informal writing like emails, web content, and social media posts. These sources often use straight quotes for convenience and simplicity.
If a student submits a writing assignment, and there is a mixture of both curly and straight quotes or apostrophes, many professors assume that this means a student copied and pasted all or part of their assignment from what AI wrote for them.
Reasons for This Happening
There could be legitimate reasons why your submission contains both curly and straight punctuation.
- What are the settings of your word processing program?
- Did you copy from a legitimate research source that you were allowed to utilize? If so, saving the research you collected and pointing out the use of quotations in the research source could be helpful.
- Did you use Grammarly to help with spelling and grammar suggestions? Some Grammarly settings will highlight a word in quotations and give the user a choice of using straight quotes or curly quotes. Perhaps you wanted curly quotes but mistakenly clicked the straight option.
Avoiding any Misunderstanding
To avoid any misunderstanding, or to prevent problems before they start, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Cite or reference any sources you might have used to prepare your assignment.
- Fix settings on Grammarly or any word processing program that you use to make sure your quotation marks and punctuation are of a consistent style.
- If you can use AI for some aspects of your assignment (researching, creating an outline) and you prefer curly quotes in your interactions with AI, many times you can specify this in the settings or you can prompt it to use a more formal style.
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