A student at Adelphi University has been exonerated by a Nassau County Supreme Court Judge after he was accused of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate a plagiarized essay.
Freshman Orion Newby, who is on the Autism spectrum, was cleared of wrongdoing on Thursday, January 29 by a judge that ruled that the academic violation he received for the alleged AI usage be stricken from his record.
Newby sued the university in July 2025 after a history professor accused him of turning in an AI-generated essay after it purportedly received a 100 percent Turnitin AI-detection score. However, a violation report failed to include any details of how that score was achieved.
Newby completely denied having used AI to write the paper - noting that the only help he received was via a tutor in the University's Bridges to Adelphi program for students on the spectrum - but nonetheless, he was officially accused of plagiarism, and an attempt to appeal the ruling was denied.
He was required to participate in a three-hour academic honesty workshop as punishment, despite the fact that the AI-detection software used on his essay contained results that contradicted between AI and human-written content.
However, Newby is celebrating now that his name has been cleared.
"I felt like my life was over," Newby said to the media following the judges ruling. "I didn't want to be known as a plagiarist."