Professor Catches Student Cheating On Essay With ChatGPT

Artificial intelligence is becoming more useful nowadays, but it showed its dark side this week. On December 26, a professor caught his student cheating with ChatGPT.

It is a free AI tool that creates text according to user commands. Furman University assistant philosophy professor Darren Hick found signs that his student submitted AI-generated text. 

However, he fears people would find it harder to distinguish it from a manually-written text in the future.

How did a professor catch a student cheating with ChatGPT?

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“Academia did not see this coming. So we’re sort of blindsided by it,” Professor Darren Hick told the New York Post. 

He added, “As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my [academic] friends said, “Yeah, I caught one too.”

Hick asked his class to “write a 500-word essay on the 18th-century philosopher David Hume and the paradox of horror.”

However, he noticed a particular submission that had signs AI created the student’s rudimentary answer. 

The professor noted, “It’s a clean style. But it’s recognizable. I would say it writes like a very smart 12th-grader.” 

“There’s particular odd wording used that was not wrong, just peculiar.….”

“… if you were teaching somebody how to write an essay, this is how you tell them to write it before they figure out their own style.”

How did he confirm the student used ChatGPT for cheating? First, Hicks entered the text into ChatGPT, yielding a 99.9% likely match.

Unlike other plagiarism detection programs, it does not cite sources. Second, the professor tried to recreate the student’s essay by inputting questions he may have used. 

Unfortunately, the tool provides unique responses, so Hicks could not get a direct match. Finally, Hicks confronted the student who admitted to using ChatGPT and failed the class.

The professor was glad to catch his cheating student, but he fears that future cases would likely be impossible to prove.

“This is learning software — in a month, it’ll be smarter. In a year, it’ll be smarter,” he said. Also, Hicks said it is “easy and instantaneous,” unlike asking someone else to do your homework. 

Conclusion

A professor caught his student cheating on a writing assignment with ChatGPT. Yet, Darren Hick expects future AI articles will not be as easy to spot.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that merely follows human commands. In the right hands, it helps promote small businesses online and quickly detect health problems.

Nevertheless, technology is changing our daily lives, and you must adapt. Fortunately, Inquirer Tech provides the latest digital trends worldwide.