This semester, as professors began posting their syllabi, I noticed a new addition to the plagiarism portion. The use of ChatGPT, a new AI that is rapidly growing in popularity, is prohibited, as it is considered plagiarism.
What exactly is ChatGPT? It’s a free AI-powered tool that has scanned millions of documents and billions of different words to become the largest and most powerful language processor ever created.
You can have human-like conversations with it and enlist it to compose essays, poems, presentations and emails for you; it even has the ability to write code and perform math problems.
ChatGPT is not the first machine-powered essay transcriber, but the scary fact of its power is that, unlike previous iterations of this tool, it’s hard to tell that a robot wrote it at all.
ChatGPT has the entire content of the internet at its disposal, which is why its use is considered plagiarism. The tool plucks wording and content straight out of websites and preexisting sources to write on any given topic.
It does not have the ability to think for itself and come up with its own wording, but it sure can emulate that effect.
What does this mean for the future? Currently, pushback for ChatGPT is occurring in school systems and universities. Turnitin, the plagiarism detection tool ETSU uses, has announced that in 2023 their software will include the ability to detect if student work was written by an AI.
In the coming years, will this stigma around ChatGPT still exist? American media company CNET recently admitted to using AI to write their stories for them since last year.
Will we as a society begin to embrace ChatGPT, and similar AI tools, as a substitution for writing ourselves? ChatGPT is not perfect yet, but it’s on the cusp of being a very powerful AI tool, one before now only read about in sci-fi books.
