53 CHEAT GPT

NEED A GREAT, EXPERIENCED ENGLISH TEACHER OR PERSONAL TUTOR? Contact Teacher Jack!

[Convenient New Feature: ARCHIVE of All Articles]

STUDENTS ARE USING AI-POWERED CHAT BOT TO CHEAT IN SCHOOL

A South Carolina college professor is sounding the alarm on students’ use of advanced chatbots, powered with artificial intelligence, to complete various class assignments.

Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University, claims that one of his students used ChatGPT—an advanced AI-powered chatbot recently released by OpenAI and freely available to the public—to create a philosophy essay.

While checking the essays turned in by his students, one caught his eye because of its unusual wording. It was not grammatically incorrect, but it was not language that a human college student would use. Hick compared it to the work “of a very smart 12th grader,” adding that the chatbot’s capacity to produce original works both terrorized and fascinated him.

“It is a clean style. But it is recognizable,” the professor said. “There is a peculiar, odd wording used that is not wrong, just strange. If you are teaching somebody how to write an essay, this is how you tell them to write it, before they figure out their own style.”

Hick had assigned his university students to write a 500-word essay on 18th-century philosopher David Hume, as a take-home test. While checking the essays, Professor Hicks noticed that one essay featured very “basic” answers and an unusual style. He immediately suspected AI use, so he decided to test for it.

First, he plugged the text into a software tool created by the producers of ChatGPT, to determine if it had been produced by artificial intelligence. The result was a 99.9% likely match. Then, Hick tried producing his own essay with ChatGPT, using a series of questions that he imagined his student would have used. The result was similar to the suspicious essay but not a direct match, because the chatbot produces unique results every time.

Left with no other way to prove that the essay had been created by AI, Darren Hick confronted the student and managed to get a confession out of him. The guilty student had indeed used the ChatGPT chatbot to produce the essay and thus failed the class. The case was also turned over to the college dean.

After uncovering the truth, the professor shared the experience on Facebook and was not surprised to learn that other colleagues had caught their students doing the same thing. This left him wondering how he and teachers will be able to catch such cheating in the future, since AI-powered tools are only getting more advanced.

“This is self-improving software — in a month, it will be smarter. In a year, it will be even smarter,” he said. “I feel a conflict between abject terror and what this is going to mean for my day-to-day job — but I also feel it is fascinating; it is endlessly fascinating.”