There’s a new threat in the classrooms across the country: a new way to recruit Artificial Intelligence technology to skirt the academic crime of plagiarism.
University professors, department chairs and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence, which was released in November by the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI. Unlike previous plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin or EasyBib, the chatbot generates much more articulate and nuanced text in response to short prompts, with people using it to write love letters, poetry, fan fiction — and unfortunately, their schoolwork.
This menace to learning and to academic integrity is leading educators to scramble for a solution. In the process, it’s prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones.
It has upended some middle and high schools, with teachers and administrators trying to discern whether students are using the chatbot to do their schoolwork. Some public school systems, including in New York City and Seattle, have since banned the tool on school Wi-Fi networks and devices to prevent cheating, though students can easily find workarounds to access ChatGPT.
In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the A.I. tool because administrators doubt the move would be effective and they don’t want to infringe on academic freedom.
That means the way people teach is changing instead. That’s especially true as generative A.I. is in its early days and presumably, will become even more effective. OpenAI is expected to soon release another tool, GPT-4, which is better at generating text than previous versions. Google has built LaMDA, a rival chatbot, and Microsoft is discussing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Silicon Valley start-ups, including Stability AI and Character.AI, are also working on generative A.I. tools.
Frederick Luis Aldama, the humanities chair at the University of Texas at Austin, said he planned to teach newer or more niche texts that ChatGPT might have less information about, such as William Shakespeare’s early sonnets instead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The chatbot may motivate “people who lean into canonical, primary texts to actually reach beyond their comfort zones for things that are not online,” he said.
In case the changes fall short of preventing plagiarism, Mr. Aldama and other professors said they planned to institute stricter standards for what they expect from students and how they grade. It is now not enough for an essay to have just a thesis, introduction, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion—things that at least for now, artificial intelligence cannot do. Assignments in future may have to tap into the students’ most personal experiences, but will artificial intelligence eventually invade that space too?
One thing is for sure, educators are always playing catch-up with rulebreakers.
