Hey guys I really messed up horribly and it’s my own fault but I just wanna know your opinion on my best course of action.
Basically we had to write an assignment in class one morning and I was 2 hours late, so to make up for the time I used AI. I did write the assignment myself but I heavily used AI to find information and sources that I didn’t use myself, and I didn’t check my AI generated reference list that had wrong names attached to the links.
My teacher noticed my sources weren’t correct and made a notice to the academic integrity board. They had a meeting with me where they asked me about my work and I told them I’d used Wikipedia as source for my work and realised that Wikipedia isn’t an academic source so I said I took references on Wikipedia pages that I didn’t actually use and let AI format these into a reference list which is why the reference list doesn’t make sense.
Afterwards this lie has been gnawing on me and I’m scared they are gonna investigate it or punish me more harshly for having an unconvincing explanation. The problem is that the Wikipedia pages don’t have my sources, though I don’t know if they will manually check Wikipedia pages for that. I’m tempted to send an email explaining what I said wasn’t true and what actually happened, however I’m scared this will make it worse as I’ll have admitted in writing to saying something untruthful to them. I already admitted to using sources that I didn’t actually read and using AI without checking, so maybe sending the mail will just complicate things further. I have a classmate who was also convicted of AI fraud and was allowed to redo the assignment, but he didn’t lie to the committee when they talked to him…
I know I’m an absolute idiot but I’m just wondering what my best option is here..