Some Santa Barbara Educators Are Embracing AI in the Classroom
Some Santa Barbara Educators Are Embracing AI in the Classroom
Publish Date: 2026-05-02 18:41:00
Source Domain: www.independent.com
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how students write, think, and learn — proving itself to be a double-edged sword. At Dos Pueblos High School and UC Santa Barbara, the next generation is being taught how to use it as a tool, not a crutch — and recently, UCSB has announced it will launch a new undergraduate major in artificial intelligence for the 2026–27 academic year.
Many folks try to pick out the software’s writing, saying that the heavy use of em dashes, or the “it’s not this, it’s this” formula are telltale signs. The issue with that train of thought is that both are frequently used in AI-produced writing because that is based on human-produced writing, which uses both.
As far as AI detection goes, many UCSB professors try to discern their students’ work from a robot through the use of artificial intelligence detectors (which are also powered by artificial intelligence), such as Turnitin. The AI platforms that students use such as Chat GPT and Google Gemini are Large Language Models (LLMs), which means they take the most familiar patterns used in writing, coding, calculations, etc. and spit out the most likely answer. If the answer is the most likely one, how hard is it to differentiate between it and a real student?
“There is no such thing as an AI detector,” said Dos Pueblos High School video production and yearbook teacher John Dent.
UCSB multimedia and writing professor Daniel Frank agreed. “You cannot detect AI writing,” he said. “We speak in patterns. That’s what AI produces — patterns.”
False positives and false negatives, he added, make enforcement unreliable, particularly for students who already write in formulaic ways, including English-language learners.
“If we just say, ‘Don’t use it,’ all we’re doing is pushing it into the shadows,” Frank said. “And then students use it in all the wrong ways without understanding what it is.
“Writing is thinking,” Frank…
