University students are acing in their examinations through the dedicated hours given to their advanced language generators and AI language tool such as OpenAI playground.
According to Motherboard, these tools help students write their papers effortlessly, as, in these AI-produced responses, it is hard to detect if it is ‘not’ written by the student himself. Since these responses cannot even be detected by plagiarism software, schools and universities may find it challenging to counteract this next-generation subversion.
In an interview with Motherboard, a student who goes by the Reddit username innovative_rye says "It would be simple assignments that included extended responses."
"For biology, we would learn about biotech and write five good and bad things about biotech. I would send a prompt to the AI like, 'what are five good and bad things about biotech?' and it would generate an answer that would get me an A," he added.
In addition to this, innovative_rye also describes how using AI tools helps him in focusing on what he thinks is important. "I still do my homework on things I need to learn to pass, I just use AI to handle the things I don't want to do or find meaningless,"
While it is still a debated topic whether AI-generated writing should ever be considered an original work or not, since it is undetected in plagiarism software, they see these AI-made prompts as original works.
If only the plagiarism software were capable of generating these AI-generated writings, it would not have been a problem. However, it is still a question of if and when software will be able to catch up with AI.
"[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 and it's not able to pick it up because the text wasn't copied from anywhere else," says George Veletsianos, Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning & Technology and associate professor at Royal Roads University.
"Without knowing how all these other plagiarism checking tools quite work and how they might be developed in the future,[...] I don't think that AI text can be detectable in that way." He continued.
While it is truly an issue of concern for the teachers as these students are definitely cheating in their papers, the AI tools also raise questions of whether the learning is moving forward for the generation.
