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Teachers shift gears to avoid A.I. plagiarism
As concern over students using A.I. chatbots rises, teachers must prepare to deal with the issue constructively.
BY MATTHEW DALDALIAN CONTRIBUTOR
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OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research laboratory, has recently launched ChatGPT, a text-generating tool open to all for free. This chatbot is capable of understanding and answering questions through prompts, and hence is becoming extremely popular among students.
Textbots like ChatGPT can rescue last-minute assignments that can range from writing Shakespearean poetry to doing calculus. As such A.I. gets exploited by students, teachers are looking for ways to detect such plagiarism.
“We clearly need to come up with new ways to evaluate learning if we want to avoid these bots to be used to fake student work,” said Bérengère Marin-Dubuard, an A.I. enthusiast and teacher in interactive media arts at Dawson College.
Marin-Dubuard also expressed her thoughts on the quality of the text written by the A.I.
“The text generated is interesting, but in the end I’d be surprised if many people just don’t do the work,” she said. “It’s probably even more work to set it up.”
Marin-Dubuard encour- ages her class to embrace the new technology as a tool, but she remains wary of the threat of plagiarism.
ChatGPT’s technology relies on natural language processing — a subfield of computer science based on the interaction between computers and human language.
“One part of how ChatGPT works is by learning complex patterns of language usage using a large amount of data,” said Jackie CK Cheung, an associate computer science professor at McGill University and the Associate Scientific Director at Mila A.I. Institute of Quebec.
“Think at the scale of all the text that is on the internet,” Cheung added. “The system learns to predict which words are likely to occur together in the same context.” explained that the developing A.I. would eventually improve as researchers and users feed it new knowledge, a process known as “deep learning.”
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