AI misuse in student-advisor collaborations. Part 1

What do you do when your PhD advisor insists on using AI in ways that put you in a difficult position?

By Andrew Maynard · October 26, 2025 · Original post · Download Markdown · Print / save as PDF

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Note: If you’re a PhD student who is grappling with an advisor who you feel is making your life challenging with how they are using AI, there’s an opportunity to anonymously share your experiences below.

If you work or study in a university, it’s hard to avoid the topic of AI and education. How do you combat AI-assisted “cheating?” How do you AI-proof your course? How do you accelerate learning using AI? How, as an instructor, can you offload the “tedium” of teaching to an AI bot? And so on.

But one topic I haven’t come across until recently is the potential misuse of AI by PhD advisors when collaborating with their grad students. And it’s one that I find concerning me—a lot.^[1]

Imagine a scenario where you are a PhD student who’s been working for weeks on a paper you’re writing with your advisor.^[2]

Now imagine that your advisor returns your carefully crafted draft, and you don’t recognize it. It’s been extensively rewritten, it no longer reflects your voice or ideas, it’s full of errors, and half citations are wrong.

Your work, it turns out, has been run through the academic mangle of ChatGPT by the person who holds your academic career in their hands. And you’re expected to pick up the pieces.

This is a hypothetical scenario. But it does reflect behaviors that I’m increasingly hearing about on the academic grapevine. And it’s reflective of ways of using AI that potentially place grad students in a very precarious position personally and professionally.^[3]

And yet, despite the occasional anecdote and grapevine-whisper, there is remarkably little known about the nature and extent of such uses of AI in PhD-advisor collaborations—or similar collaborations where there’s a clear power differential between the people involved.

Because of this, rather than weigh in feet-first, I wanted to gather a bit more evidence—albeit anecdotal.

And so, if you’re a PhD student who has experienced AI-related challenges when collaborating with your advisor, I’d like to hear from you.

This isn’t a research project, and the data won’t be analyzed and published—its simply a way of getting a better sense of the landscape around the use of AI in student-advisor collaborations so that potential issues can be surfaced.^[4] It’s also fully anonymous.

Share your experiences

If you have something you’re willing to share here, please follow the link below to an anonymous Google Form.

Share your experiences

Depending on the responses, I’m intending to write more about what the challenges look like here—and how they might be addressed—in a later post.

In the meantime, for anyone working with grad students, it’s worth asking how your use of AI impacts your student in ways you may not be thinking about—including whether it’s robbing them of their dignity, denying them learning opportunities, making their life unnecessarily harder, or even placing them in a position where their academic career could be in jeopardy.

More to come …