AI: A Helpful Tool or a Powerful Impersonator?

*DISCLAIMER: Max Vaughan is not a cheater

For those unaware, ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence that responds to prompts given by humans.  Many students across the country have used this program to write their papers for them while teachers and administrators have to try harder to discern what is and what is not plagiarized work.  

Since November, 100 million users have asked the program to do almost anything, with the majority asking to write for them.  For months, many schools and organizations have discussed the dangers of this new technology. Sarah Elaine Eaton, a Professor at the University of Calgary feels that Ai - when used in the right ways - can help students.  ChatGPT can help generate ideas which a student can then refine and improve.  Many use it the wrong way, and use what the program has generated and pass it off as their own.  A student would now be plagiarizing the program instead of a human, but they should make sure that the information they steal is accurate. 

“In the case of artificial intelligence, tools linked to large language models do not plagiarize in any traditional sense.  The text generated by AI apps should not be presumed to be plagiarized, even though the content has been harvested and then aggregated from a variety of online sources.  In many cases, the text itself is completely original – sometimes to a fault.  ChatGPT, for example, can fabricate details and the resulting text is not only original, it can be completely untrue.” Teachers should know what is false information, but it adds another layer to this mess. 

“I think it can be used to generate good ideas, but at the same time using it as a shortcut isn’t a smart idea” -Max Vaughan. 

Some might believe that this issue has no solution, and artificial intelligence will continue to evolve with no barriers. Edward Tian, a Princeton graduate, found a way around this. He created GPTZero, a program that uses the chatbot to detect itself. 

The program detects ai based on how complex the writing is and how varied the sentence structure is. The harder it is for the program to understand the text, the more likely it is human-made. ChatGPT usually creates uniform responses as it draws from a set source of data. This tool is new and is not 100% foolproof, and cannot fully detect every difference between a human and a robot. OpenAI, the creator of the “original” chatbot, is also working on a secret watermark that will appear any time text is copied. It seems that both of these ways will prevent further plagiarism, at least until it finds a way to work around it. 

As for the future of AI, who's to say? It will likely continue to grow, and so will detection tools. Although there is one simple solution, just force students to write on paper; no one has the patience to copy all that plagiarized writing down.