My Ivy League school is threatening to suspend me if I don't shut down mystartup | Hacker News Reader

My Ivy League school is threatening to suspend me if I don't shut down mystartup

moltar.ai

You're making a homework automation tool. It goes against the founding principle of academia to automate it. Of course they're mad.

Your options are to drop out or close shop.

In academia the whole exercise is to make the student do the processing of reading themselves. After all, if skipping to the gist were acceptable, the professor would've just handed out the gist already.

The school's administration would be annoyed by such a tool regardless of who created it, but since it's a student undermining other students' ability to practice academic rigor, they're putting their weight on you.

If any mods need to reach out for proof, I would be happy to share the letter and further personal details.

On Friday I received the letter stating I will face a disciplinary hearing for quote, "Specifically, it is alleged that you created an Artificial Intelligence tool and distributed it to students attending the School of ..." (A specific school within my university).

On April 17th, I launched my startup, an AI powered PDF Document and URL Link reader website to help students in this generation and the next who face an increasing cognitive challenge in the classroom. I'm so passionate about this issue that I don't even charge anything, completely free to use. Since launching a little over a month ago I've amassed over 1,200 users. My website is not an essay writer, can't complete exams or homework assignments for students. In simple terms, it is nothing more than a reading assistant there to help students with dense documents/articles/videos.

I'm now left with uncertainty. This is a top university and I fear they will demand I shut down the website if I want to stay enrolled. I have some defense arguments planned that I believe should help, but man I'm scared.

My warning to other high school/ college students creating similar AI projects, keep it away from your specific institution. There's thousands of schools out there to market to, don't risk your entire education like I just did.

Best of luck, and cheers to the future.

Did the university indicate what part of the code of conduct they believe you've violated? Might be worth reading through that document.

they have me as breaking their academic dishonesty and facilitating academic dishonesty policies. My website is nothing more than a reading assistant. It can't be used to help students cheat, which is why it shouldn't breach these rules

I assume you have lawyered up? otherwise you might be representing yourself in front of what passes for a board of regents/trustees.

The school can still kick the student out for cause and the lawyer will not prevent that.

doesn't that mean the student has to actually breach the policy? it sounds like at the moment that they don't like what he's done, but can't seem to explain exactly what makes it academic crime.

I agree that they should explain and are most likely just dropping the hammer on something they don’t like.

My point is school boards have no requirement to be transparent and generally aren’t something you can appeal or use the actual legal system to help you with. If they decide they want to kick you out, that’s it. They’re intimidating the student and I guess what I’m saying is the student should seriously consider whether or not they want the degree because I don’t think they can fight the academic dishonesty board even if the student is technically right.

might make a good personal statement for a rival ivy League university though.

Depending on how important this is for you, I'd get an attorney involved and ask the faculty members who are accusing you "HOW are you facilitating academic dishonesty".

It's really easy to accuse someone of something, it's much harder to substantiate it, especially when it's factually not true.

I know attorney's aren't free (nor cheap), that's why I asked how important this is for you, and if it's worth putting your [current] academic pursuits in jeopardy.

Best of luck.

Your site says it "Turn hours of homework into minutes" and provides "instant responses and insights to all your questions" -- this definitely gives the reasonable impression it can be used to cheat on assignments.

Irrespective of what your application does for students, the text on the first page refers to turning hours of homework into minutes, which could sound a lot like “does your homework for you.” I have no opinion on the subject not knowing the policies or having evaluated the product though

> “offering instant responses and insights to all your questions”

This phrasing sounds a lot like saying it’ll give you answers to your problem set out whatever.

On a slightly different and opinionated note, bite the bullet and stay in school. A lot of people push the “you don’t need school” ideology but considering you’re in a top school and (presumably) studying CS you’ll get a lot of value from just having the degree (whether or not you agree with this practice is besides the point)

"paste the URL of the content you want to analyze" -- Apparently this has been a problem where the content is restricted IP behind a login barrier, the URL contains an auth/login token, and the AI scrapes the restricted content without being authorized to do so. They have the right to get a judge to order you not to do that anymore. If your AI analyzes it and displays a summary, you are producing a derivative work, which is a copyright infringement, which means a judge will order you not to do that anymore.

One has to say - getting a AI-generated summary of dense material is not the same as reading, pondering and understanding dense material. You are at university to, in part, develop your ability to process and understand dense, difficult material. Using an AI here provides a crutch that prohibits individuals from developing these critical skills.

That doesn't even delve into the hallucination issue... which is still present even for this type of processing.

In general, students should depend on less AI, not more. Perhaps I'm getting old, but I see nothing good coming from a tool like this for students...

Step 1: IMMEDIATELY disable the URL-fetcher's ability to fetch from your university's website(s). Any content on your system that you already scraped from your university's website, purge that too and keep no copies. It sounds like that's what they're mad about.

Get your legal advisor to tell them that you have done so (all communication seriously needs to go through your legal rep). It will probably give you some breathing room.

There is no article here. Feels like spam.

How did they know it was you? Maybe change the name and remove any links to you and the project.

And, fwiw, I'd start charging for it... that way if it takes off, and you make millions, and you do get disciplined, you probably won't care that much.

Also agree with the suggestion to study the rulebook; perhaps there's a compromise version where it doesn't violate school policy but is still incredibly useful. From the school's position, I imagine AI-enabled study apps are basically an extinction level event for the school's "services," which are basically minting a degree proving that you learned what their brand assures you did. I imagine there's hundreds or thousands of apps that enable cheating, as defined by its current rules. I imagine education will eventually evolve, but first they'll fight the many projects like yours.

Are most of your users using it to help with cognitive impairments and get linked information or to reduce the amount of reading they have to do for homework? Because if it’s the latter then you probably need to reconsider the ethics of what you’ve created.

1. How is this any different from Google's NotebookLM or literally any prompt based LLM that can parse long documents?

2. Right now, your homepage says "Moltar will analyze the content, offering instant responses and insights to all your questions."

The language on the homepage could easily be interpreted as though this does your homework for you. In fact, I had to read it twice to understand that that's not what was being suggested.

But again, what is special about this? I don't need Moltar to do this for me when I have free access to MS/Google's AI tools, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

Also note: Hanna-Barbera owns all rights to the name 'Moltar', so you'll be hearing from their lawyers too...

Good forcing function. If you believe in your start-up, drop out and use it as your pitch. If it’s a side project, fight the university but cave for the time being. Either way, a side-project “start-up” while at university isn’t here nor there.

Please, be a serious person. The tagline of the homepage is literally "Turn Hours Of Homework Into Minutes" and you're acting surprised that they're upset? You built a tool to make academic misconduct even easier. ChatGPT is already something teachers are struggling with and you're repackaging it and marketing it as an easy button.

Honestly I can't imagine that a real human who grew up in this universe would be surprised at this, but there definitely does seem to be a class of valley dwellers that seem to think their actions play out in a vacuum, in which case, yea, drop outta school and move to the valley, and start slangin' products that ultimately hurt your users the most. The point of homework is to do it and think about it, not to get it done.

Because at the end of the day, tools to help you get through coursework with the greatest conservation of ignorance only hurt the student. There will be kids in the course who do put in the effort, learn the material, and they will absolutely kick the shit out of the kids who didn't when it's time to enter the job market.

By "valley" do you mean "Silicon Valley"? You're not wrong, and this might be a Stanford thing, but it's easily a Harvard or Columbia (i.e Ivy League) thing. (Zuck and hot-or-not being a Harvard critter.)

1) your tagline is "Turn Hours Of Homework Into Minutes" which implies a tool to automate your homework. That type of tool can certainly fit with academic dishonesty. So I can see where they are coming from.

2) your tool doesn't look so different from publicly available tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft edge's pdf reader....

3) something very similar happened at my Ivy League undergrad when a student developer created an online version of the paperback course catalog with a better UI than the university version. Students were supportive and it became a thing on campus for a while, and ended up ultimately becoming a feather on the resume for those students https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/nyregion/yale-students-ta...

Why not quit school?

Sorry to hear that. Consider consulting a lawyer to see what your options are.

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