A college professor in South Carolina is raising concerns after discovering a student writing an essay for his philosophy class using ChatGPT. It is a brand-new artificial intelligence chatbot that can swiftly ingest. Moreover, spew out textual content on a wide range of topics.
The OpenAI-released, publicly accessible technology is just a few weeks old. It deals with higher education which is already hampered by widespread cheating yet another blow.
“Academia did not see this coming. So we’re sort of blindsided by it,” Furman University assistant philosophy professor Darren Hick told The Post. “As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my [academic] friends said, ‘Yeah, I caught one too.’”
David Hume’s paradox of terror explores how individuals may find satisfaction in something they fear. It was the topic of a 500-word essay that Hick had asked his class to write earlier this month for a take-home test.
However, he claimed that one submission included a few telltale signs that “flagged” the use of AI in the student’s “rudimentary” response.
“It’s a clean style. But it’s recognizable. I would say it writes like a very smart 12th-grader,” Hick said of ChatGPT’s written responses to questions.
Hick acknowledged that it would be challenging to establish that ChatGPT was the author of the work. It was impossible without having experience with copyright law ethics. The professor first entered the questionable material into ChatGPT software to determine if AI created the written response.
He received a match that was 99.9% likely. But the software provided no citations, unlike typical plagiarism detection programs or a well-written college paper.
Hick then attempted to create the same essay by posing a series of hypothetical queries to ChatGPT. Since the tool generates unique replies, the action produced comparable answers. However, they did not directly match.
Student using ChatGpt was failed
In the end, he confronted the student, who admitted to using ChatGPT and received a failing grade. The academic dean of the university also received an undergraduate.
However, colleges like Furman struggle to establish official academic norms for emerging technology. Hick worries that more incidents would be nearly hard to prove. Additionally that he and his colleagues will soon be flooded with falsework.
For the time being, Hick claims that the best he can do is to unexpectedly provide impromptu oral tests to suspicious pupils. This will be an effort to catch them off guard without their tech armor.
“This is learning software — in a month, it’ll be smarter. In a year, it’ll be smarter,” he said. “I feel the mix myself between abject terror and what this is going to mean for my day-to-day job — but it’s also fascinating, it’s endlessly fascinating.”
