Silicon Valley firm insists its new text generator, which writes human-sounding essays, can overcome fears over cheating
The bot doesn’t work perfectly. It has a tendency to “hallucinate” facts that aren’t strictly true, which technology analyst Benedict Evans described as “like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures. It looks like a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense.”
But the technology has been eagerly adopted by exactly that sort of student, who needs to generate a passable essay in a hurry. The output of ChatGPT hasn’t triggered any conventional plagiarism detectors up to this point, since the text it produces hasn’t been written before, leaving assessors struggling to work out how to identify cheaters.
Since the release of ChatGPT, various organisations have instituted specific policies against submitting AI-generated text as one’s own work. Stack Overflow, a Q&A site that specialises in helping programmers solve coding problems, banned users from submitting responses written by ChatGPT.
“Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers.” The use of AI tools to generate writing that can be passed off as one’s own has been dubbed “AIgiarism” by the American venture capitalist Paul Graham, whose wife, Jessica Livingston, is one of the backers of OpenAI. “I think the rules against AIgiarism should be roughly similar to those against plagiarism,” Graham said in December. “The problem with plagiarism is not just that you’re taking credit away from someone else but that you’re falsely claiming it for yourself.