A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.
She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15% of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an artificial intelligence chatbot.
“My heart just freaking stops,” said Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.
But Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous…