Tech-savvy students are reportedly getting A+ grades by having their papers written for them by sophisticated language generators, most notably OpenAI's insanely sophisticated GPT-3, as reported by Motherboard. Additionally, schools will have a hard time preventing this new form of infiltration because AI-written responses cannot be identified as plagiarized by anti-plagiarism software.
"It would be simple assignments that included extended responses," a college student who goes by innovate rye on Reddit explained to Motherboard. "As part of our biology course, we were required to research biotechnology and then list five advantages and five disadvantages of the field. I could ask the AI something like, "What are five good and bad things about biotech?" and it would come up with an answer that would guarantee me a perfect grade."
Kids? Using their advanced understanding of developing technologies to get around restrictions placed on them online by people who aren't as tech-savvy as they are? There was simply no way to have anticipated this.
If anti-plagiarism software could detect when a suggestion is generated by artificial intelligence, this wouldn't be a problem. While there is philosophical debate over whether or not AI-generated writing can be considered original, plagiarism-checking software currently treats it as such, and whether or not they will catch up is unknown.
According to Royal Roads University associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning & Technology George Veletsianos, "[the text] is not copied from somewhere else, it's produced by a machine, so plagiarism checking software is not going to be able to detect it."
His next statement was, "I don't think that AI text can be detectable in that way without knowing how all these other plagiarism checking tools quite work and how they might be developed in the future."
Kids today are definitely cheating, and educators have good reason to worry about the long-term effects of this behavior on student achievement.
However, if you ask innovate rye, AI is merely assisting him in zeroing in on what he considers to be most crucial.
"I still do my homework on things I need to learn to pass, but I use AI to take care of the things I don't want to do or find meaningless", innovate rye told Motherboard.
"What will the future be like if AI can do your homework right now?" he continued,
