A sponsored TikTok video posted by star LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne plays into an international debate over how and when students should be able to use artificial intelligence in classwork.
Dunne, who has 7.2 million followers on TikTok, posted a video on Sunday afternoon as part of a paid partnership with Caktus AI, an artificial intelligence service designed to help students automate their classwork.
In the video, Dunne shows herself typing in the phrase "gymnastics is the hardest sport" and the AI tool writes out sentences based on the prompt.
According to the website, Caktus AI bills itself as "the first ever educational artificial intelligence tool." Requests for comment to Caktus AI were not returned this week.
In a statement, LSU did not specifically address Caktus AI, but warned students to be careful with how they use artificial intelligence tools generally.
"At LSU, our professors and students are empowered to use technology for learning and pursuing the highest standards of academic integrity," the statement said. "However, using AI to produce work that a student then represents as one’s own could result in a charge of academic misconduct, as outlined in the Code of Student Conduct."
LSU's Code of Student Conduct does not specifically address artificial intelligence, but it does prohibit plagiarism, which it defines as the "lack of appropriate citation, or the unacknowledged inclusion of someone else's words, structure, ideas, or data; failure to identify a source, or the submission of essentially the same work for two assignments without permission of the instructor."
Artificial intelligence has become a prominent issue in education circles after the unveiling of ChatGPT, a large-scale learning model that scours the internet for information it can use to produce text in a conversational format. Many academics have raised concerns that students will use ChatGPT or similar tools to generate written assignments instead of doing the work themselves.
In February, the university posted an explainer on its website describing for faculty what ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools are and what their limitations can be.
"You’ve likely seen a lot of panic and concerns about how to best adapt," the explainer says. "But as with any technology, this is an ideal opportunity to reflect on our current teaching practices, experiment with new opportunities, and brainstorm ways they could be utilized effectively in a classroom."
It is unclear how much Dunne made from her TikTok post about Caktus AI, but the junior gymnast from Hillsdale, New Jersey has captured college athletics’ new world of name, image and likeness (NIL) profits unlike any other.
The sports website On3.com recently ranked NIL valuations of the top 100 college and high school athletes. Dunne is No. 3 in the overall rankings as of Wednesday, with a valuation of $3.4 million. She is No. 1 among female athletes.
According to a report by Betsperts, Dunne's 3.7 million Instagram followers have generated an audience that has vaulted her into the highest-earning college athlete on the platform.
The report says that Dunne makes between approximately $31,900 and $43,200 for each sponsored post, more than double Auburn gymnast and Olympic medalist Sunisa Lee.
While she has declined to give an exact net worth, Dunne has said commercials and endorsements for brands like Vuori, American Eagle and Forever 21 have helped her earn “seven figures.”