Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3
And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing
But here is sort of the funny thing, as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate things like poetry a lot more and have even tried my hand at it a few times for fun.
I guess it just proves the old adage "retirement is wasted on the old and school is wasted on the young". Not sure who said that. I probably just committed plagiarism for not including an attribution. Sorry to whomever said it, wait, let me copy some Tracy Chapman Lyrics for the apology :)
Teachers sometimes become suspicious because the students’ submitted texts contain many fewer grammatical errors and nonidiomatic expressions than the students’ speech or in-class writing. But it is hard to prove plagiarism if the teachers cannot do web searches in the students’ first language.
I did hear once, though, of a cut-and-paste MT translation being caught by a teacher because it included some large unique numbers, which did appear in a Google search.
A related issue that writing teachers are struggling to come to terms with is whether second-language writers are cheating when they use MT to translate texts that they originally wrote in their first language. Some teachers, especially in language-focused classes, believe that the use of MT hurts the students’ language acquisition and thus defeats one purpose of the writing assignments; they also think it is unfair to other students who struggle to write in the second language without the help of MT. Other teachers believe that writers should be allowed to use whatever tools are available to them as long as their content is original.
After all, it's arguably only one step away from Grammarly correcting errors and otherwise fine-tuning your writing. I don't personally use it but I know people who swear by it. And presumably almost no one would consider that cheating.
Plagiarism is copying someone else's work; using AI (or an essay farm manned by humans) is outsourcing the creation of a new thing.
There was the famous example where Copilot regenerated some John Carmack code verbatim with cussing comments, presumably because that code had been copied many times already.
Somewhere I read about GPT-3 committing clear plagiarism in English text, too, i.e. drawing way too much from one source and reproducing it.
ADDED: There is a degree of I know cheating when I see it. But, absent specific instructions to the contrary, spell checkers and grammar checkers/recommenders seem to fall pretty clearly into the assistive tools category whereas GPT-3 does not.
Legalities do matter here. The definition is “taking someone else’s work.” AI (currently) has no rights and no ownership. It is an “it” and not a “someone.” You are using a tool, an advanced tool that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. IOW, “don’t bring a graphing calculator.”
But it appears we are on the same page. If it’s directly against the rules, that’s different (like bringing an advanced calculator to an elementary math exam). But it def isn’t plagiarism.
GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.
By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.
Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.
Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.
If it's somebody else's, give them credit.
If it's algorithm or automated output, say so.