“Tom, not his real name, is one of the students who ~~conducted his own experiment~~ plagiarised using ChatGPT.”
Is it really any worse than googling something and paraphrasing it yourself
One way to waste your student loan when you get thrown out for plagiarism, I suppose.
Cardiff, the only university where students have heard of ChatGPT apparently.
I’m guessing there’s 10’s of thousands of submissions all across the country that have used ChatGPT in some form or another.
I’m in university currently and my degree would feel worthless if I used AI to write my essays.
Having said that, a friend of mine has a report she needs to do for work and she’s been putting it off because it’s so boring. I didn’t hesitate to recommend using ChatGPT for her since it was only formatting information she’d already gathered into a legible form.
Edit: typo
Universities should be encouraging their students to use tools that will be essential for their careers.
Maybe the universities should come up with better ways to assess student abilities rather than relying on old fashioned methods that can now be replicated with AI?
I think we’re going about it the wrong way. AI will only increase in presence in the workplace. I think it’s better to actually incorporate AI in teaching to better prepare students for work.
When I was 13 I was one of the first children to have a computer with _Microsoft Encarta_.
For about two weeks I did all my homework cut and pasting articles and changing the tense here and there.
The teachers called me in with my parents eventually to ask why my homework was so well written. I told them and they laughed and said, oh well – you can’t really do that.
Point being it was new technology that the teachers didnt know about. It was very easy to get it past them when they weren’t expecting it.
Right now universities don’t know what chatgpt looks like or how it works.
When ChatGPT first came out, it could fool me on reddit. But after two weeks I could start to spot it.
In two years they will have their own software designed to spot ChatGPT.
I used ChatGPT to write me a cover letter for a job application and got compliments on it LOOOOOOOOL
To say students are going to use this technology for similar things should be expected honestly.
20 years ago it was essay mills and websites to download papers. Now it’s AI.
Lazy students will always find a way to ‘beat’ the system.
Headline in a months time. Lecturer admits to using ChatGPT to summarise and grade boring dissertations
I don’t really think it’s that bad, it’s a thing now, the focus should be on going through that work and verifying any claims it makes are correct and finding the correct sources
I’m sure plenty of kids are smart enough to get away with this but I’m betting the majority will get caught eventually. Anyone that has spent any time getting ChatGPT to write stuff will realise that it has a very recognisable writing style. Most regular users can spot it from a mile away and I’m sure university lecturers will realise this.
Of course there are ways around this and eventually the AI will reach a point where this won’t be a problem, but for now these kids are playing with fire.
My university has banned it and rightly so. The essay is to test what you know, not your ability to type prompts into an AI program. ChatGPT is great tool and it’s use should be taught where it would be helpful but until universities figure out how to do that they should be banned for now
The key part is telling it to make at least a few grammatical mistakes or limiting is vocabulary etc to make it seem human
What if ChatGPT is used generate examples of things to write about, then those examples are researched?
“Tom, not his real name, is one of the students who conducted his own experiment using ChatGPT.”
Why do they do this, why don’t they just say “a student who wishes to remain anonymous” and refer to them as he/she/they?
Honestly if these things can somehow statistic their way into pumping out coherent work rateher than simply convinceing work Viva Voce is probably going to be the gold standard of examination. Which is going to fuck with funding.
Slightly playing devil’s advocate but I’m wondering if future generations will look back at the people calling this plagiarism the way we look back at people who called calculators cheating and demanded kids should do long division by hand.
Maybe it’s the new normal. Why should we write essays au naturel when for the vast majority of people it’s clearly superior to at least be assisted by AI?
Using it as a learning aid is different from getting it to do your assignments for you. Sounds like this guy was using it mostly as an aid. I see nothing wrong with that (if that is in fact the case).
The real thing that matters is whether he learned the material. And it’s hard to tell but he got a 2.1 without any aid so it’s arguable that he did
Learning to collaborate with AI is going to become an important skill in the future just as learning how to use Microsoft office is today, so there’s no point in trying to criminalise it. Change is happening, embrace it or get left behind.
Unsurprising. I imagine universities (and academic journals) will need to move with the times.
I submitted a manuscript to a journal recently and they’ve updated their disclosure guidelines. You have to specify whether you’ve used an AI tool such as ChatGPT and explain what it was used for.
The media overstate the sophistication of chatgpt. Its a fascinating glimpse into the the potential and promise ai offers given time and further refinement.
As it exists presently – the algorithms generate eerily coherent but conspicuously clinical and sterile walls of text – Lacking the flourishes, nuance or distinguishing idiosyncrasies characteristic of an individual flesh and blood author.
I use it to all for bullet points of things to cover rather than the actual document
Theres nothing wrong with using it. From my experience its very good for helping you with ideas when you are stuck. If you are straight up copy and pasting and not referencing, then thats just downright stupid.
A smart university would utilise ChatGPT, would cross-reference against it’s output for standard requests for information, and would work with these AI tools, rather than criticise it’s use. After all, LLM’s are known to hallucinate, and ChatGPT (while amazing) is known to say some hilariously incorrect things at times. Educate people, in the same way that many places did when Wikipedia became a thing many years ago.
As for cheating, you’d be surprised at how many people cheat, whether it’s through AI tools, or old-fashioned methods like paying someone a few hundred to do the work for you. You’ll never stop it, so embrace that these things exist and test against them/leverage them.
This happens a lot at my university. However nobody I’ve met just puts in the essay title and uses the exact answer it uses.
They mostly use it to quickly find topics/rough information to do further research on. So it’s not really much different than using google, its just finding the information for you.
It is great for giving prompts for things to write about and expand on topics.
Personally I’ve never used it for any of my work as I don’t want to risk it, but I’ve tried it out in my free time and it is extremely useful.
Good. Students get the machine to write the essays and educators grade the essays using their automated grading systems. Now everyone is free to learn what they want.
I had to write some pretty simple marketing blurb last week but I couldn’t be arsed. Asked Chapgpt for it. Pretty much exactly what I would’ve written spewed out, i added a link/call to action and sent it to the client for approval. Nice.
When they approve it, I’ll ask chatgpt to bang it into an html email format. Ill find a banner image and off it goes. 🤷♂️
Universities are going to insist that all essays are written under high supervision conditions, which will make what should be a routine part of assessment more stressful.
30 comments
“Tom, not his real name, is one of the students who ~~conducted his own experiment~~ plagiarised using ChatGPT.”
Is it really any worse than googling something and paraphrasing it yourself
One way to waste your student loan when you get thrown out for plagiarism, I suppose.
Cardiff, the only university where students have heard of ChatGPT apparently.
I’m guessing there’s 10’s of thousands of submissions all across the country that have used ChatGPT in some form or another.
I’m in university currently and my degree would feel worthless if I used AI to write my essays.
Having said that, a friend of mine has a report she needs to do for work and she’s been putting it off because it’s so boring. I didn’t hesitate to recommend using ChatGPT for her since it was only formatting information she’d already gathered into a legible form.
Edit: typo
Universities should be encouraging their students to use tools that will be essential for their careers.
Maybe the universities should come up with better ways to assess student abilities rather than relying on old fashioned methods that can now be replicated with AI?
I think we’re going about it the wrong way. AI will only increase in presence in the workplace. I think it’s better to actually incorporate AI in teaching to better prepare students for work.
When I was 13 I was one of the first children to have a computer with _Microsoft Encarta_.
For about two weeks I did all my homework cut and pasting articles and changing the tense here and there.
The teachers called me in with my parents eventually to ask why my homework was so well written. I told them and they laughed and said, oh well – you can’t really do that.
Point being it was new technology that the teachers didnt know about. It was very easy to get it past them when they weren’t expecting it.
Right now universities don’t know what chatgpt looks like or how it works.
When ChatGPT first came out, it could fool me on reddit. But after two weeks I could start to spot it.
In two years they will have their own software designed to spot ChatGPT.
I used ChatGPT to write me a cover letter for a job application and got compliments on it LOOOOOOOOL
To say students are going to use this technology for similar things should be expected honestly.
20 years ago it was essay mills and websites to download papers. Now it’s AI.
Lazy students will always find a way to ‘beat’ the system.
Headline in a months time. Lecturer admits to using ChatGPT to summarise and grade boring dissertations
I don’t really think it’s that bad, it’s a thing now, the focus should be on going through that work and verifying any claims it makes are correct and finding the correct sources
I’m sure plenty of kids are smart enough to get away with this but I’m betting the majority will get caught eventually. Anyone that has spent any time getting ChatGPT to write stuff will realise that it has a very recognisable writing style. Most regular users can spot it from a mile away and I’m sure university lecturers will realise this.
Of course there are ways around this and eventually the AI will reach a point where this won’t be a problem, but for now these kids are playing with fire.
My university has banned it and rightly so. The essay is to test what you know, not your ability to type prompts into an AI program. ChatGPT is great tool and it’s use should be taught where it would be helpful but until universities figure out how to do that they should be banned for now
The key part is telling it to make at least a few grammatical mistakes or limiting is vocabulary etc to make it seem human
What if ChatGPT is used generate examples of things to write about, then those examples are researched?
“Tom, not his real name, is one of the students who conducted his own experiment using ChatGPT.”
Why do they do this, why don’t they just say “a student who wishes to remain anonymous” and refer to them as he/she/they?
Honestly if these things can somehow statistic their way into pumping out coherent work rateher than simply convinceing work Viva Voce is probably going to be the gold standard of examination. Which is going to fuck with funding.
Slightly playing devil’s advocate but I’m wondering if future generations will look back at the people calling this plagiarism the way we look back at people who called calculators cheating and demanded kids should do long division by hand.
Maybe it’s the new normal. Why should we write essays au naturel when for the vast majority of people it’s clearly superior to at least be assisted by AI?
Using it as a learning aid is different from getting it to do your assignments for you. Sounds like this guy was using it mostly as an aid. I see nothing wrong with that (if that is in fact the case).
The real thing that matters is whether he learned the material. And it’s hard to tell but he got a 2.1 without any aid so it’s arguable that he did
Learning to collaborate with AI is going to become an important skill in the future just as learning how to use Microsoft office is today, so there’s no point in trying to criminalise it. Change is happening, embrace it or get left behind.
Unsurprising. I imagine universities (and academic journals) will need to move with the times.
I submitted a manuscript to a journal recently and they’ve updated their disclosure guidelines. You have to specify whether you’ve used an AI tool such as ChatGPT and explain what it was used for.
The media overstate the sophistication of chatgpt. Its a fascinating glimpse into the the potential and promise ai offers given time and further refinement.
As it exists presently – the algorithms generate eerily coherent but conspicuously clinical and sterile walls of text – Lacking the flourishes, nuance or distinguishing idiosyncrasies characteristic of an individual flesh and blood author.
I use it to all for bullet points of things to cover rather than the actual document
Theres nothing wrong with using it. From my experience its very good for helping you with ideas when you are stuck. If you are straight up copy and pasting and not referencing, then thats just downright stupid.
A smart university would utilise ChatGPT, would cross-reference against it’s output for standard requests for information, and would work with these AI tools, rather than criticise it’s use. After all, LLM’s are known to hallucinate, and ChatGPT (while amazing) is known to say some hilariously incorrect things at times. Educate people, in the same way that many places did when Wikipedia became a thing many years ago.
As for cheating, you’d be surprised at how many people cheat, whether it’s through AI tools, or old-fashioned methods like paying someone a few hundred to do the work for you. You’ll never stop it, so embrace that these things exist and test against them/leverage them.
This happens a lot at my university. However nobody I’ve met just puts in the essay title and uses the exact answer it uses.
They mostly use it to quickly find topics/rough information to do further research on. So it’s not really much different than using google, its just finding the information for you.
It is great for giving prompts for things to write about and expand on topics.
Personally I’ve never used it for any of my work as I don’t want to risk it, but I’ve tried it out in my free time and it is extremely useful.
Good. Students get the machine to write the essays and educators grade the essays using their automated grading systems. Now everyone is free to learn what they want.
I had to write some pretty simple marketing blurb last week but I couldn’t be arsed. Asked Chapgpt for it. Pretty much exactly what I would’ve written spewed out, i added a link/call to action and sent it to the client for approval. Nice.
When they approve it, I’ll ask chatgpt to bang it into an html email format. Ill find a banner image and off it goes. 🤷♂️
Universities are going to insist that all essays are written under high supervision conditions, which will make what should be a routine part of assessment more stressful.
Thanks everyone.