Secondary teachers warn students are increasingly using artificial intelligence to cheat on their school work - and some are getting away with it.

They told RNZ that AI had huge potential for improving education, but misuse of the technology was a big problem.

Schools were using computer programmes to scan essays and reports for evidence of AI use, but teachers said it was not foolproof.

St Patrick's College Wellington head of science Doug Walker said misuse of AI had grown rapidly and the school now ran an AI-detector over all computer-based essays and reports.

"If I gave students just free rein, I suspect the majority of them would use AI," he said.

"Most often I'm dealing with cases where students have been told not to use it and then you're investigating what has happened in terms of using AI. That can be quite hard to unpick and to work back through to see how much of the work is the student's own or how much has used or relied on AI."

AI detection tools could give wildly different estimates of the likelihood that a report or essay contained AI-generated content, he said.

If those tools raised a red flag, Walker said he looked at the various changes and edits a student had made to their work.

In one recent instance, this checking process revealed a paragraph giving instructions to Chat GPT to reword the essay it had created in the style of a 17-year-old.

A common tell-tale sign was copying and pasting of large blocks of text.

Students were, however, becoming more sophisticated, Walker said.

"They've got to the stage now where they've realised that can be spotted quite easily and so now they'll have an AI-generated response and then physically type that AI-generated response so that you can't see large blocks of text suddenly appearing in the history of the student's work," he said.

"Some students are genuinely using it to try and generate sources, like websites, to go to learn about something. Some would be using it to help break down a more complex concept into language that's more suitable for their understanding.

"But I think there's a very fine line between that and then having it generate the report and then claiming that understanding as their own," Walker said.

Auckland English teacher Kit Willett said he got a shock after as many as one in five students misused AI for assessments early last year.

"I haven't seen anything on that scale. There has always been plagiarism and cheating, but when tools like this are so accessible and so easy to use and so easy to generate large amounts of content, it becomes a lot easier to plagiarise."

Onslow College deputy principal Michael Bangma said those students who had been caught using AI to do their work were just the tip of the iceberg.

"For every piece of work that is detected, there'd be a lot that's not detected in every school - I'd be pretty confident of that. But I think some schools are saying, 'Oh well, we all just have to do it on pen and paper.' That's just going backwards and trying to deny the future."

Westlake Girls High School science, technology and maths coordinator and fellow with Unesco's International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence, Susana Tomaz, said problems with misuse were over-stated.

"We get stuck on the misuse and and a lot of those progressive conversations just stop there on the plagiarism. Research has shown that AI has not increased plagiarism - it's just another way of plagiarising."

The Education Ministry said both it and the Qualifications Authority had advice for teachers on AI and the level of acceptable use.

But Hamilton secondary school teacher Benny Pan said students and teachers needed more.

"We don't have national guidance... [and] because we don't have that, students feel like they can do whatever they want and because educators don't know what is right, what is wrong or what is allowed, what is not allowed, it's pretty hard to judge what is misuse or not sometimes."

Pan said he and other educators were working through the AI Forum to fill the gap.

"You will see many passionate educators working on this," he said.

An AI-generated image used by pupils at Maungatapu School in Tauranga to illustrate a story about Maui and how he stole the sun. Photo: Maungatapu School / supplied

Threat to creativity?

At Tauranga's Maungatapu School, the seven and eight-year-olds of Room 14 created a highly polished picture and song about the legend of Maui stealing fire.

Or did they?

Teacher Chris Dixon said his class wrote their own versions of the story and then used AI to improve and edit their stories, create a song and illustrate it.

"The stories had been changed - these wonderful pieces of writing - but you couldn't tell they were ever written by the child; [they had] completely lost their voice," he said.

"We had some very interesting conversations around, 'Is this still your work?' [and] 'You're really proud of this - but is it really yours?"

Some of his pupils said the work was no longer theirs, but others were delighted with the results and wanted to show their parents.

It was a great way to get the kids thinking, but Dixon said he was worried about the effects on children's creativity.

"There needs to be a space for children to develop creativity themselves. I don't want to see that replaced by machine learning or an artificial intelligence tool.

"If it's used to enhance learning, that's fantastic - as long as it's not taking away the skills that children are developing at this age."

It would normally take a class weeks to illustrate a story, but using AI the work was done in about an hour, with very high production values, Dixon said.

"Why would we go to the effort of drawing when we can use a tool to do it for us?"