Sneaky Students Using AI to Write Their Papers For Them

Kids? Being better at technology than adults? We're shocked.

Honor Code

Tech-savvy students are reportedly getting straight As by using advanced language generators — mainly OpenAI's wildly advanced GPT-3, according to Motherboard — to write papers for them. And as these AI-written responses can't be detected by plagiarism software, schools are likely to have a difficult time combatting this next-gen subversion.

"It would be simple assignments that included extended responses," a college student who goes by innovate_rye on Reddit told Motherboard. "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."

Kids? Using their vast knowledge of burgeoning technologies to circumvent digital boundaries that adults simply don't know how to keep up with? No one could have seen this one coming.

Plagiarism Software

If plagiarism software were capable of flagging AI-made prompts, this probably wouldn't be an issue. But while there's definitely a philosophical debate to be had about whether any AI-generated writing should ever be considered original, it's technically seen as such by plagiarism-checking softwares — and it's unclear if or when those systems will ever be able to catch up.

"[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," George Veletsianos, Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning & Technology and associate professor at Royal Roads University, told Motherboard.

"Without knowing how all these other plagiarism checking tools quite work and how they might be developed in the future," he continued, "I don't think that AI text can be detectable in that way."

Busy Work, Shmusy Work

Of course, these kids are definitely cheating, and teachers are probably right to be concerned about what this means for learning moving forward.

Ask innovate_rye, though, and AI's just helping him focus 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," innovate_rye told Motherboard.

"If AI is able to do my homework right now," he added, "what will the future look like?"

READ MORE: Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are [Motherboard]

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