Dartmouth's Provost Resigns After a Faculty Panel Found He Used AI to Alter His Writing, Including a Washington Post Column Semafor Flagged as 100% AI

The second-ranking academic at an Ivy League school has stepped down over how he used artificial intelligence, the Daily Caller reports.

The resignation. Santiago Schnell resigned as Dartmouth College's provost Wednesday. President Sian Leah Beilock confirmed it, saying, "I expect our senior leaders to hold themselves to the highest standards," and that leaving "was his decision."

The finding. An Oct. 27 memo from a faculty-led committee said Schnell "used AI to meaningfully alter his writing in violation of at least one publication's AI use and/or disclosure requirement," failed to disclose it "in clear violation of a national newspaper's stated policy," and "was not forthcoming about his AI use."

How it began. Semafor reported Aug. 26 that an Aug. 9 Washington Post guest column under Schnell's name, on universities fighting AI cheating, tested as 100% AI-written with the detector Pangram. Schnell told Semafor he wrote the essay from his own thinking, then used ChatGPT "to refine a few arguments" and check grammar, and that the Post edited it through several rounds. The student paper The Dartmouth later checked his work: pieces from before November 2022 read as "100% human-written," and nine from this year were likely "96% AI-written," by the same tool.

The timing. The Daily Caller notes the news came during a three-day AI conference at Dartmouth.

Note for readers: AI detectors are not proof, and the findings here come from a faculty committee's memo as relayed by the Daily Caller, WCAX and Semafor. We did not see a statement from Schnell about the resignation.