Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job

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On August 9, 2026, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed called “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” This week, Schnell discovered the depths of the problem himself as he resigned from the university after an advisory committee found that he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in the Washington Post op-ed, even though publishers required such disclosure.

2026年8月9日，达特茅斯学院教务长圣地亚哥·施内尔（Santiago Schnell）在《华盛顿邮报》发表了一篇题为《大学正在打击人工智能作弊，但存在一个更深层的问题》的评论文章。本周，施内尔本人亲历了这一问题的严重性，他在一个咨询委员会发现其在学术论文和《华盛顿邮报》评论文章中未披露重要的人工智能使用情况后，辞去了教务长职务，尽管出版商明确要求进行此类披露。

Schnell didn’t make it especially easy for the committee to investigate his AI use; the report uses the term “insufficient cooperation.” He did turn over his Dartmouth laptop, but he did not turn over logs from his personal LLM accounts related to the writings in question. Nor did he agree to meet with the committee. The committee did get access to the Claude enterprise account Schnell had used through Dartmouth, though. This shows him using the LLM as a tool for revising his papers, finding and fixing bugs in code, and editing or generating figures.

施内尔并没有为委员会调查其人工智能使用情况提供便利；报告中使用了“配合不足”一词。他确实上交了达特茅斯学院的笔记本电脑，但没有提供与相关文章有关的个人大语言模型账户日志，也未同意与委员会会面。不过，委员会确实获得了施内尔通过达特茅斯学院使用的Claude企业账户的访问权限。这显示他将大语言模型作为修改论文、查找和修复代码错误以及编辑或生成图表的工具。

For instance, Schnell would run his papers through Claude and ask things like: I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper? This is quite a bit different from asking Claude to write your entire paper for you, and Schnell has long insisted that he used AI as an editorial aid and discussion partner.

例如，施内尔会将论文输入Claude并询问诸如：“我正准备将随附的论文、补充材料和代码库提交给《ChemSystemsChem》。这篇论文不是生物学方面的，而是化学方面的。假设你是这篇论文的审稿人，具备非线性化学动力学和数学化学动力学方面的专业知识。你会为这篇论文写什么样的审稿报告？”这与要求Claude代写整篇论文有很大不同，施内尔长期以来一直坚称他只是将人工智能作为编辑辅助工具和讨论伙伴。

He told Semafor that he had used chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor that he “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” He had not disclosed his AI use to an academic journal, he said, because he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.” Indeed, Schnell’s own description of what he did with AI doesn’t sound, on the long list of AI-powered sins, like it would rank near the top.

他告诉Semafor，他使用聊天机器人是为了“润色一些论点”和“检查语法错误”。他曾告诉一位期刊编辑，他“将人工智能作为编辑工具”，以“帮助润色句子、提高清晰度和论点的表达”。他说，他没有向学术期刊披露其人工智能的使用情况，因为他“不明白这种人工智能辅助编辑需要披露”。事实上，在众多人工智能相关的违规行为中，施内尔对自己使用人工智能的描述听起来并不像是最严重的。

But it’s hard to know. As the Dartmouth committee points out, the full scope of Schnell’s AI use was unclear to them. The committee believes that Schnell’s public statements may understate “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” and says that Schnell regularly “went beyond his other public descriptions of his use of AI in writing.” We do know that Schnell also asked LLMs to take TeX files and “make the corrections to the files, and the repo. If you have to generate new figures, please provide them to me. Let me know what you change in the repo, and text files so that I can take a look into it.”

但很难下定论。正如达特茅斯委员会指出的那样，他们并不清楚施内尔使用人工智能的全部范围。委员会认为，施内尔的公开声明可能低估了“教务长实际使用人工智能的性质”，并表示施内尔经常“超出了他在写作中使用人工智能的其他公开描述”。我们确实知道，施内尔还要求大语言模型处理TeX文件，并“对文件和代码库进行更正。如果需要生成新图表，请提供给我。让我知道你在代码库和文本文件中做了哪些修改，以便我查看。”

Whatever you think of his actions, Schnell repeatedly failed to disclose them. It is certainly possible that he thought his AI use was on par with a spelling or grammar checker, though one Claude exchange raises questions about whether Schnell wanted to hide traces of LLM activity in his work. From the committee report: Provost Schnell’s Claude logs reflect that he uploaded to Claude a manuscript of a forthcoming article entitled Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance and prompted Claude: “Are there many signatures of AI writing in this article?” Schnell later submitted a revised manuscript that incorporated the kinds of changes Claude suggested.

无论你如何看待他的行为，施内尔都一再未能披露这些情况。他确实有可能认为自己对人工智能的使用等同于拼写或语法检查器，尽管Claude中的一次对话引发了人们对施内尔是否想在作品中隐藏大语言模型活动痕迹的质疑。根据委员会报告：教务长施内尔的Claude日志显示，他曾将一篇即将发表的文章手稿上传至Claude，标题为《学术自由与天主教使命：大学治理中的程序重叠区》，并提示Claude：“这篇文章中有很多人工智能写作的痕迹吗？”施内尔随后提交了一份修订后的手稿，其中包含了Claude建议的修改内容。

Schnell has now resigned. Dartmouth, though, is barreling ahead with AI. The university calls itself the place that “launched the field of artificial intelligence” back in 1956, when “the term was coined and the foundational question was asked: Can machines solve problems once reserved for human minds?” Seventy years later, Dartmouth is hosting a conference called “What Must Remain Human?” that will feature a student hackathon sponsored by Anthropic and speakers like Mira Murati and Yann LeCun.

施内尔现已辞职。然而，达特茅斯学院仍在全力推进人工智能的发展。该大学自称是1956年“开启人工智能领域”的地方，当时“该术语被创造出来，并提出了一个基础性问题：机器能解决曾经属于人类思维的问题吗？”七十年后，达特茅斯正在举办一场名为“什么必须保持人性？”的会议，其中包括由Anthropic赞助的学生黑客马拉松，以及米拉·穆拉蒂（Mira Murati）和杨立昆（Yann LeCun）等演讲嘉宾。

Despite the scandal, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock wants more AI. (She wrote a piece for The Atlantic in September called “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth.”) What’s crucial, though, is that the school’s leaders should “hold themselves to the highest standards,” she said. This appears to mean one main thing: disclosure. In announcing Schnell’s resignation, Beilock wrote that “each of us brings a different perspective on how and when to incorporate AI into our work and our lives. Moreover, keeping Dartmouth at the forefront of AI inevitably means leading through an environment that is fluid and fast-changing. That is why, as leaders, it is so critical that we model the transparency and human judgment that we expect from our students and scholars.”

尽管发生了丑闻，达特茅斯校长西安·利亚·贝洛克（Sian Leah Beilock）仍希望引入更多人工智能。（她九月份为《大西洋月刊》撰写了一篇题为《为什么我希望在达特茅斯引入更多人工智能》的文章。）但她表示，至关重要的是，学校领导层应该“以最高标准要求自己”。这似乎主要意味着一件事：披露。在宣布施内尔辞职时，贝洛克写道：“我们每个人对于如何以及何时将人工智能融入工作和生活都有不同的看法。此外，保持达特茅斯在人工智能领域的前沿地位，不可避免地意味着要在流动和快速变化的环境中发挥领导作用。这就是为什么作为领导者，我们必须以身作则，展现我们对学生和学者所期望的透明度和人类判断力，这一点至关重要。”

Who wrote this? What does “disclosure” mean? In a September 2026 paper on AI detection tools, called “Who Wrote This?”, Schnell himself goes to great lengths to argue that “human-written” or “AI-written” is far too simple a binary. In his view, everything will become a mix of human judgment and AI work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The key for him is that the human author takes full responsibility for the text, however it was composed and edited. In the paper, Schnell lays out his method for producing it. It’s worth quoting at some length:

谁写的这些？“披露”意味着什么？在2026年9月一篇关于人工智能检测工具、题为《谁写的这个？》的论文中，施内尔本人竭力论证“人类写作”或“人工智能写作”是一个过于简单的二元对立。在他看来，一切都将成为人类判断和人工智能工作的混合体，这并没有什么错。对他而言，关键在于人类作者要对文本承担全部责任，无论它是如何创作和编辑的。在论文中，施内尔阐述了他的创作方法。值得大篇幅引用如下：

In September 2026, I asked OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Pro whether an AI-written essay could ever be identified with certainty, and I suggested connecting the problem to Turing’s imitation game and to the “reverse” Turing test posed by AI-text detection. GPT-5.6 Pro connected the question to binary hypothesis testing and statistical decision theory, proposed early structures and titles, identified candidate literature, and generated portions of early drafts. I chose the problem, journal, audience, and eventual direction of the argument. I decided which examples and res

2026年9月，我询问OpenAI的GPT-5.6 Pro，人工智能撰写的文章是否能被确定无疑地识别出来，并建议将这个问题与图灵的模仿游戏以及人工智能文本检测所带来的“反向”图灵测试联系起来。GPT-5.6 Pro将这个问题与二元假设检验和统计决策理论联系起来，提出了初步结构和标题，确定了候选文献，并生成了部分初稿。我选择了问题、期刊、受众以及论点的最终方向。我决定了哪些例子和研究结果。