The student was not punished for "using AI", but for plagiarism:
>The incident occurred in December 2023 when RNH was a junior. The school determined that RNH and another student "had cheated on an AP US History project by attempting to pass off, as their own work, material that they had taken from a generative artificial intelligence ('AI') application," Levenson wrote. "Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations)."
so they were caught due to the citations to non-existing books. it seems fine and unconnected to all of the controversial news stories of using AI detection, which has a high rate of false positives
The teacher noticed a few irregularities such as the time the student spent inside the submitted project. The cheater student only had around 55 mins logged whereas everyone else had 7-8 hours. That set off alarm bells for the teacher who then actually looked into the paper more and noticed fake citations and it was flagged as “ai” generated when they ran it through a few ai detectors.
Good. Insofar as the point of a school paper is to make the student do the thinking and writing, taking it from ChatGPT is plagiarizing from OpenAI.