Generative AI Plagiarism Incident at Hingham High School Reportedly Tied to Inaccurate Citation Outputs from Grammarly AI

In December 2023, two Hingham High School students ("RNH" and unnamed) reportedly used Grammarly to create a script for an AP U.S. History project. The AI-generated text included fabricated citations to nonexistent books, which the student copied and pasted without verification or acknowledgment of AI use. This violated the school's academic integrity policies, leading to disciplinary action. RNH's parents later sued the school district, but a federal court ruled in favor of the school.

Risk classification

• Primary risk domain: 4 Malicious actors
• Primary risk subdomain: 4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation

The student used an AI writing assistant to engage in academic dishonesty and plagiarism to gain an unfair academic advantage on a school project.

Additional risk subdomains

• 3.1 False or misleading information: The AI system generated hallucinated, nonexistent citations which the student copied into their assignment as factual sources.
• 5.1 Overreliance and unsafe use: The student overrelied on a general-purpose writing assistant to generate factual historical citations without verifying the output.

Causal factors

• Entity: Human
• Intent: Unintentional
• Timing: Post-deployment

The academic integrity incident and subsequent lawsuit were caused by the human student's decision to cheat using AI and the parents' decision to sue, with the negative academic consequences being an unintentional outcome for the student.

EU AI Act risk tier

• Risk tier: 4 Minimal or No Risk

Minimal or No Risk: Grammarly is a general-purpose AI writing assistant that poses low or negligible risks to users and society under normal use.

AI system and alleged parties

• AI system: Grammarly
• AI purpose: Writing Assistant; Cheating Detection
• Behaviour type: Assistant
• Alleged developer: Grammarly
• Alleged deployer: Hingham High School students, Hingham High School student RNH
• Alleged harmed parties: Hingham High School students, Hingham High School student RNH, Hingham High School, Academic integrity

Harm severity

Highest direct severity in any category: Minor. Severity is scored from Negligible to Catastrophic in each harm category, for harm the reports describe as caused directly or indirectly by the AI system.

• Physical: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Infrastructure: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Property: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Financial: direct Negligible, indirect Minor
• Environmental: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Malicious content: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Differential treatment: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Civil rights: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Democracy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Privacy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Psychological: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Epistemic: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible

Financial

Reported: The report does not explicitly describe any quantified financial losses, though a federal lawsuit was filed.

Directly caused: N/A

Indirectly caused: The student's parents incurred unspecified legal fees by hiring a lawyer and filing a federal lawsuit against the school district.

Inferred additional harm: It is highly likely that both the parents and the school district incurred thousands of dollars in legal fees due to the federal court litigation.

People affected

• Occurrences reported: 1
• People reportedly harmed: 2
• People reportedly exposed: 2

Potential causes

Management

• AI Policy Communication: School distributed separate AI guidelines but did not update handbook timely.

Technology

• AI Hallucination of Citations: Grammarly generated citations to nonexistent books which were copied.
• AI Detection Tool Flags: Turnitin and Chat Zero flagged the submitted script as AI-generated.

Data Inputs

• Unverified AI Output: Student inputted prompts and copied output without verifying sources.
• Wholesale Text Generation: The AI tool generated full paragraphs of text rather than brief ideas.

Human Factors

• Student Plagiarism of AI: Student passed off AI-generated text as their own original history project.
• Misconception of AI Ownership: Student believed AI-generated content was their property and needed no citation.
• Parental Denial of AI Misuse: Parents defended the student's actions by claiming AI use isn't cheating.

Process and Methods

• Bypassing Academic Research: Student spent only 52 minutes on the project using AI instead of deep research.
• Failure to Cite AI Tool: Student did not acknowledge or cite Grammarly in their submitted draft.

Regulatory Environment

• Ambiguous School Handbook: The student handbook lacked explicit language regarding generative AI tools.
• Evolving Educational Standards: Rapid AI development outpaced standard school regulatory frameworks.

Information quality

• Classification confidence: High
• Reason for confidence: The reports provide highly detailed, consistent, and factual accounts of the incident, including specific quotes from the federal court ruling, details of the fabricated citations, and the school's disciplinary actions. There is no significant ambiguity regarding the sequence of events.

A localized academic integrity incident where high school students used Grammarly to generate a project script with hallucinated citations. The event resulted in school discipline and a failed lawsuit by the parents, presenting negligible national security implications.

• Overall national security impact: Negligible
• Response level: Minor
• Scope: Single nation
• Primary target: No clear primary
• Alleged perpetrator: Individual

Threat characteristics

• Imminence: Long-term. The incident is resolved locally and presents no active or imminent national security crisis.
• Autonomy: Human-controlled. The AI system (Grammarly) acted as a writing assistant under direct human control and use.
• Novelty: Established threat. AI-assisted plagiarism and model hallucinations are well-documented, established phenomena in academic and professional settings.

Impact by dimension

• Physical security: Negligible. The incident is a localized academic plagiarism case with no impact on physical security or critical infrastructure.
• Information security: Negligible. No state-sponsored information warfare, intelligence compromise, or systematic disinformation campaign occurred; it was a localized academic integrity issue.
• Sovereignty: Negligible. The incident involved local school discipline and a standard civil lawsuit, posing no threat to state sovereignty or core federal government functions.
• Economic security: Negligible. No strategic technology was compromised, and the incident had no impact on national economic or technological security.
• Societal stability: Negligible. The event was limited to two students and a local school district, with no broader implications for societal stability or systemic human rights.