Plagiarism, AI & ChatGPT

A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails.

To harness the potential and avert the risks of OpenAI’s new chat bot, academics should think a few years out, invite students into the conversation and—most of all—experiment, not panic.

The AI chatbot has stoked fears of an educational apocalypse. Some teachers see it as the reboot education sorely needs.

Some instructors seek to craft assignments that guide students in surpassing what AI can do. Others see that as a fool’s errand—one that lends too much agency to the software.

Recently, I gave a talk to a group of K-12 teachers and public school administrators in New York. The topic was artificial intelligence, and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with all kinds of capable A.I. tools.

Beyond the new technology’s implications for the classroom, what can ChatGPT teach academics about their own writing?

Generative AI is revolutionizing the way we create original text and images with computer assistance. The ramifications are many for both content creation and pedagogy in higher education.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Wharton professor Ethan Mollick about his decision to embrace artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT in the classroom.

If you’re naive about it, ChatGPT will refuse to generate fake citations or abstracts. ChatGPT can also provide some suggestions that may or may not be useful in the context of information literacy regarding such citations.

The buzz is we’re in the midst of an artificial intelligence spring. While previous cycles disrupted the labor of workers whose time and skill were less highly valued by owners and administrators, some believe the latest round of AI functions has the potential to replace labor performed by high-status workers like lawyers and researchers. One such tool is Elicit, which markets itself as a research assistant capable of greatly reducing the time it takes to conduct a literature review or write a research proposal.

ChatGPT has caught our attention in higher education. What will it mean in 2023?

Chances are you’ve heard about ChatGPT by now. It’s a chatbot released in November that, having been fed a steady diet of digital text from the internet, can turn out decent copy. Enter a prompt and it spits out a few paragraphs in response. The more detailed your prompt, the more specific the writing.

As an instructor, I have no interest in a vision of student achievement that would deem this hybrid process illegitimate. The things ChatGPT cannot do (cite and analyze evidence, limit claims, create logical links between claims, arrange those claims into a hierarchy of significance) are the basic stuff of college-level writing.