Students of Emory University (Georgia, USA) have created the Eightball educational application based on artificial intelligence and even received $10 thousand for it.
Local media wrote about them, and the university showcased their achievements on social media. But after a while, the publications began to be deleted, and they were suspended from school. The reason was allegedly a violation of the «Honor Code» of the university.
The developers themselves are outraged by this decision and are demanding $75 thousand in compensation in court, says Insider.
Eightball — is a website where you can download learning materials and get association cards.A mind map (mental map, associative map) — is a data visualization method that helps to structure information and find relationships between its parts. It is a flowchart that has the main idea (task), the main elements and the relationships between them. Association maps are supposed to help you better learn the material.
Eightball’s founders advertised the app as a learning tool, not a cheat sheet.
The project itself was launched in April 2023 and was evaluated at the university by making a dedicated post on LinkedIn.
The students’ successes were also reported on the university’s website (but the post has now been removed), only a web copy remains).
Eventually, the founders of the app won the Pitch the Summit startup competition and received $10 thousand.
The plan was to add new features to the app, including an AI teacher to ask questions.
«At the individual level, at the government level, and at the societal level, we must understand artificial intelligence, be very conscious and very responsible», — one of the project’s authors stated in a now-deleted publication.
But for some time now, the project participants have been suspended from classes. Motivation — violation «Honor Code». The university asked the developers to immediately close Eightball, which they did.
The university council stated that they had created Eightball with fraudulent intentions.
As a result, Benjamin Craver, a history student who was in charge of marketing the platform and one of the developers were suspended for a semester.
Currently, Benjamin Craver is seeking $75,000 in damages from the court. In a statement, he notes that the incident may interfere with his plans to enroll in law school and emphasizes that he has not seen any evidence of fraud.