A Statement on Academic Honesty

The following has been stolen (with permission) from Eric Schwerdtfeger at Dulles:

"The TFA constitution contains multiple provisions about academic honesty in speech and debate events. Please ensure that your students are familiar with these. We will investigate and adjudicate violations of these provisions as laid out in the constitution. Unfortunately, the TFA Constitution does not have provisions regarding the use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs). The tournament staff agrees with the NSDA that presenting arguments generated by LLMs as carded evidence is an issue of academic dishonesty. We are also skeptical of their utility as argument generation tools more broadly and ask that students not use them to generate blocks; however, we have no recourse here, given the absence of TFA provisions. As such, we ask that you have a frank conversation with your students prior to the tournament about the academic value of their participation in speech and debate, the way in which utilizing LLMs takes away from the long term value they stand to gain from doing their own research, thinking, and writing, as well as the long term, detrimental impact that these technologies are having on the climate and our power grid."