A college professor in the United States has made the astounding revelation that one of his pupils used robots to cheat on a class project. Professor of philosophy at Furman University Darren Hick expressed his confusion upon learning that one of his students had used artificial intelligence (AI tools) to evade completing her schoolwork.
AI tools
He posted a message on social media saying, “Today, I turned in the first plagiarist I’ve caught using AI software to write her work and I thought some people might be intrigued about the details.” The student used ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot that responds to user-generated instructions with responses that resemble human speech.
The computer generates comments that appear to have been written by a person, and one that, may we add, has a quite decent language and essay form.
The work was flawless in terms of language and syntax, but there was one significant flaw that immediately alerted him: It made no sense. The South Carolina schoolteacher claimed that the article “confidently and completely presented [the topic] in a way that was thoroughly erroneous.”
“To someone unfamiliar with the subject, it was easily readable. even powerful. It triggered any number of [red] flags to someone knowledgeable with the content,” the author wrote. The student confessed to her deception when Hick challenged her, and as a result, she failed the class. As software becomes more intelligent and is in the hands of cunning (yet lazy) pupils, the technology may be difficult to detect.
The AI tools improve as it is trained more. In essence, ChatGPT is a baby that is still learning. It would be smarter in a month, he promised.
This is a game-changer for freshman-level classrooms [and other lower levels of a college education], he wrote in the now-famous social media post.
It’s too recent. But it will gain popularity. My kid could have completed this essay utilising ChatGPT in around five minutes.
Oral presentations
The philosophy professor disclosed that as a result, he put in place a new anti-plagiarism policy.
Students will now be required to give an oral presentation right away to demonstrate that they produced the essay themselves.
That is one method of catching them. Unless students start bringing robots to class instead of themselves.
As news of students utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically compose essays spreads, some professors are starting to reevaluate how they should teach their students to write.
Writing is a challenging task to master. The best poets and writers write nonstop and have devoted their entire lives to perfecting their art. It’s common to think of the creative act of putting words together to convey ideas as something intricate, enigmatic, and clearly human. It makes sense why people find writing-capable machines fascinating.
Language models, in contrast to humans, produce content immediately and with minimal guidance. Simply enter a brief description or prompt telling the model what to produce, and it will create a written output in a matter of seconds. Therefore, it should not be surprising that kids are now using these technologies to finish their schoolwork.
Students are the ideal users since they must write frequently, in great volumes, and be familiar with the internet. There are several user-friendly and reasonably priced AI tools and writing products available.
The University of Texas
The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Rhetoric & Writing’s associate professor Scott Graham assigned his students to use AI to create a 2,200-word essay about a campus-wide problem. With the exception of the requirement that the majority of the essay be generated automatically by software, students were able to gently revise and format their work.
Graham said that the AI-assisted writings were “not excellent” in an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed, stating that the best of the bunch would have received a C or C-minus. Students would have had to improve the essay by rewriting more of it in their own words, or they would have had to create increasingly narrow and specific prompts to obtain back more insightful content, in order to score higher.
Last note
It will be challenging to put academic restrictions against AI-assisted writing into practice. There is disagreement about whether or not sentences produced by machines constitute plagiarism. The ability to accurately identify writing generated by these programs is another issue. While some educators are concerned about AI’s expanding technical skills, others think it has been overstated. More people than others are utilizing technology.
