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In the early days of the internet and, especially with Wikipedia, the tech-savvy student had it pretty good. No more poring over books in a dusty university library, finding volumes on shelves with no guide but the Dewey Decimal System. Just scroll through the entry and if you’re particularly conscientious, follow the links at the bottom to confirm the sources. Voila, research done. Then there were those who were lazier still and far less scrupulous — they just found obscure papers of websites that hosted them and passed them off as their own. And, for a while, teachers were playing catch up. Now, the challenges posed by plagiarism are set to be greater than ever.
ChatGPT, the bot developed by OpenAI, has been ringing alarm bells in academic institutions since it was launched late last year. Very simply put, the open-source platform can write papers, articles and essays with proficiency, after a simple command. And this service is available to anyone with an internet connection, for free. Understandably, university lecturers in Britain are concerned about students cogging papers and New York city schools teachers have banned ChatGPT on devices and networks.
In all likelihood, plagiarism detection software will become available vis a vis AI-generated content soon, just as it emerged in the aftermath of Wikipedia and the internet. And then, as now, there will be the determined cheaters who find their way around the barriers. The more fundamental challenge posed by ChatGPT is whether or not asking a machine to write papers, articles and even reports is avoidable on a mass scale in the long run. Education — with the exception of those who are destined for academia — is meant in large part training for a job. If machines can do all the writing, do college students need to?
