A University of Alaska Fairbanks student has been charged with criminal mischief after allegedly tearing up and eating another student's AI-generated artwork during what campus security is calling "an unstructured peer review session."
The incident raises questions that no AI ethics framework anticipated. Specifically, when the output is AI-generated and the medium is paper, does consumption constitute data destruction, art criticism, or just really aggressive editorial feedback?
The defendant's risk mitigation strategy appears to have been "if I eat the evidence, it becomes a digestion issue rather than a criminal justice issue." This approach is not recommended in any incident response playbook we have reviewed.
Campus officials are reportedly updating their Acceptable Use Policy to include a new section titled "Physical Interaction with AI Outputs." The revision will clarify that eating, burning, or otherwise destroying printed AI art remains subject to standard property crime statutes, regardless of how the original prompt was phrased.
The university's IT department has declined to comment but did circulate an internal memo reminding students that "deleting files" and "consuming files" are not interchangeable terms in any technical or legal context.
Source: Alaska Public Media
