While Daily acknowledges that this technological development sparks new interests in the academic world, she doesn’t see it as a completely unexplored area. “I think we’ve been in a version of this territory for a while now,” the Daily said. “Students who commit plagiarism often borrow material from ‘somewhere’—such as a website of unknown origin. I doubt the definition of plagiarism will expand to include production stuff.”
Ultimately, Daily believes, a student using text from ChatGPT would be no different from a student copying and pasting text from Wikipedia without attribution.
Students’ views about ChatGPT is a completely different matter. There are people who, like Cobbs, can’t imagine putting their name on anything bot-generated, but there are others who see it as just another tool, like spell check or even calculator. For Brown University sophomore Jacob Gelman, ChatGPT exists merely as a convenient research assistant and nothing more.
“Calling the use of ChatGPT to obtain trusted sources from the internet ‘cheating’ is absurd. It’s like saying using the internet to conduct research is unethical,” says Gelman. “For me, ChatGPT is the study equivalent of [typing assistant] In terms of grammar. I use it in real life and that’s really all.” Cobbs expressed a similar view, comparing AI bots to “online encyclopedias”.
But while students like Gelman use bots to speed up their research, others take advantage of the high-volume quick import feature to create finished works for submission. It may seem obvious what constitutes cheating here, but different schools across the country offer contrasting treatments.
According to Carlee Warfield, president of Bryn Mawr University’s Student Honors Council, the school considers any use of these AI platforms to be plagiarism. The dissemination of this tool only calls for greater focus on assessing the intentions behind student violations. Warfield explains that students who submit purely AI-generated essays are completely different from students who borrow from online tools without knowledge of standard citations. Because the ChatGPT phenomenon is new, it is understandable that students are confused around ethical issues. And it’s unclear what policies will remain in place after things settle down — at any given school.
Amid fundamental change in both academia and technology, universities are forced to revise definitions of academic integrity to properly reflect society’s circumstances. The only problem is, society doesn’t show stagnation.
“Villanova’s current academic integrity code will be updated to include language that prohibits the use of these tools to create text that students then present as their own independently generated text. established,” Daily explained. “But I think it’s a growing thing. And what it can do and what we will then need to track will also be a kind of moving target.”
In addition to the increasingly complex questions of whether ChatGPT is a research tool or a plagiarism tool, there is also the possibility that it could be used for learning. In other educational settings, teachers see it as a way to show students the shortcomings of AI. Some instructors have modify the way they teach by giving students assignments that bots can’t complete, such as those that require personal information or anecdotes. There is also the problem of detecting the use of AI in student work, which is a developing cottage industry all their own.
Ultimately, the Daily says, schools may need rules that reflect a wide range of variables.
“My guess is there will be the development of some overarching policy that basically says, unless you get permission from your professor to use AI tools, it would be against the law to use them. principles of academic integrity,” Daily said. “That then gives the faculty broad authority to use it during their teaching or in their assignments, as long as they clearly stipulate that they are allowed to use it.”
For ChatGTP, the program agrees. “Advances in areas such as artificial intelligence are expected to drive significant innovation in the coming years,” when asked how schools can combat academic fraud. . “Schools should continually review and update their academic honor codes as technology evolves to ensure that they are addressing the current ways in which technology is being used in academic settings. “
But, a bot will say it.
