Welcome to the new era of academic dishonesty.
South Carolina college professor raises alarm after catching student using ChatGPT — a new artificial intelligence chatbot who can quickly digest and spit out written information on a wide range of topics – to write an essay for his philosophy class.
The weeks-old technology, released by OpenAI and easily accessible to the publicdeals another blow to higher education, already plagued by rampant cheating.
“Academia didn’t see this coming. So we’re kind of caught off guard,” Darren Hick, assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, told The Post. Facebook, my [academic] friends said, ‘Yeah, I caught one too.’ »
Earlier this month, Hick asked his class to write a 500-word essay on 18th century philosopher David Hume and the paradox of horrorwhich examines how people can take advantage of something they fear, for a test to take at home.
But one submission, he said, had a few features that “flagged” the use of AI in the student’s “rudimentary” response.
It’s a clean style. But it is recognizable. I would say he writes like a very smart 12th grader,” Hick said of ChatGPT’s written responses to the questions.
“There’s a particular weird phrasing used that wasn’t wrong, just peculiar…if you teach someone how to write an essay, that’s how you tell them to write it before they do. finds its own style.
Although he has a background in copyright ethics, Hick said it was nearly impossible to prove the document was concocted by ChatGPT.
First, the teacher plugged the suspicious text into the software made by the producers of ChatGPT to determine whether the written response was made by AI.
He got a 99.9% probable match. But unlike standard plagiarism detection software – or a well-written academic paper – the software offered contains no citations.
Hick then tried to produce the same essay by asking ChatGPT a series of questions he imagined his student had asked. The move yielded similar responses, but no direct matches, as the tool formulates unique responses.
In the end, he confronted the student, who just used ChatGPT and failed as a result. The undergraduate was also turned over to the academic dean of the school.
But Hick worries that other cases will be nearly impossible to prove, and that he and his colleagues will soon be inundated with fraudulent work, as universities like Furman struggle to establish formal academic protocols for the developing technology.
For now, Hick says the best he can do is surprise suspicious students with impromptu oral exams, hoping to catch them off guard without their technological armor.
“What’s going to be the difficulty is that, unlike convincing a friend to write your essay because they’ve already taken the course or paying someone online to write the essay for you, it’s is free and instant,” he said.
Even more frightening, Hick fears that as ChatGPT continues to learn, the irregularities in his work will become less and less obvious on a student’s paper.
“It’s learning software — in a month it will be smarter. In a year it will be smarter,” he said. “I myself feel the mix between the terror of the objects and what it’s going to mean for my day-to-day work – but it’s also fascinating , it’s infinitely fascinating.”
0 Comments