Many had predicted it: cheating in a school setting using ChatGPT is happening in particular in France. A teacher at a university in Lyon discovered that several of his students had their assignments written by ChatGPT. What really question the detection of cheating and the lack of regulation in France.
It is often said that artificial intelligence will invade our society, that our uses of technology will be disrupted, without us experiencing any real changes. It’s the same story with ChatGPT, the automatic text generation AI developed by OpenAI which has been all the rage on the Internet for several weeks.
However, we observe the first concrete use cases, but not necessarily honest ones. Students from Lyon 1 University used ChatGPT to have an assignment written: unfortunately, their teacher exposed their cheating method.
Students use ChatGPT to have their homework written
14 health students had one week to write a homework assignment whose topic was “ Defining the main features of the approach to disability in Europe», in the course of Stéphane Bonvallet, teacher in handicapology. Out of 14 returned copies, the professor winced at seven that looked suspiciously alike: “It was not a copy-paste. But the copies were built exactly the same way“, he tells the Progress.
When reading the homework, several details jumped out at him: similar grammatical constructions, identical reasoning and comparable details. He explains that copieswere all illustrated by a personal example, relating to a grandmother or a grandfather… It therefore seemed obvious that these copies were not normal.»
While interviewing a female student, he learned the truth:She told me that 50% of the students in the class had used ChatGPT artificial intelligence to write their paper. Apparently, they had spread the word on social networks.If Stéphane Bonvallet had heard of the OpenAI tool and its potential dangers (especially in relation to his profession), he did not think that the AI was powerful enough to write his students’ homework.
According to the professor who discussed with his colleagues, “theThree-quarters of teachers told me they’ve had to deal with dodgy scripts in recent weeks.“. He specifies that the practice would be more widespread in high schools and wishes to find a solution as soon as possible.
Disarmed teachers: their anti-plagiarism tools do not work with ChatGPT
The problem with ChatGPT is that it is technically not plagiarism: therefore, its use is not prohibited at university, for the moment. The teacher concerned indicates that “Having no framework currently prohibiting this practice, I was forced to note them. From one copy to another, it was worth between 10 and 12.5. So I gave 11.75 to the seven students who used ChatGPT.“Lyon 1 University has taken note of the copies and “leads an instruction“. From a pedagogical point of view, the practice of automatic generation “poses a real problem of integration of knowledge, because students no longer need to carry out any research to composeadds Stéphane Bonvallet.
In college, homework assignments are mostly tested for plagiarism, based on papers from former students and pages from around the web. Anti-plagiarism tools make it possible to detect this form of cheating and above all discourage students from practicing it. Where ChatGPT does a good service for students who would like to cheat is that the texts generated by the AI are not detected by these software. If they do indeed take up content from the Internet, the latter are mixed and reformulated: the frames of sentences, if they look alike, are not identical.
Across the Atlantic, solutions are beginning to be found. As indicatedNumerama, the city of New York has decided to simply cut off access to ChatGPT in schools. The media took the opportunity to remind that the educational culture had to face Wikipedia and the smartphone: the revolution represented by ChatGPT could be of the same ilk. It is possible that an important work of information, adaptation and education awaits the educational teams of the whole world.
Knowing ChatGPT is useless: to cheat, you must above all know how to use it well
The observation made indirectly by Stéphane Bonvallet is that all students know ChatGPT today. The accessibility of the tool (free, online) makes its democratization much simpler. If schools have ways to track the use of AI and avoid cheating, we can think that it will not be as simple as that.
Besides, we have the impression that OpenAI has already restricted the use of ChatGPT for homework writing. We asked him:Write me an assignment on the subject: “Defining the main features of the medical approach to disability in Europe”“, to which she replied:”It is not possible to write you a complete assignment on this question, however I can provide you with information on the main features of the medical approach to disability in Europebefore listing said traits. However, the system is very easy to circumvent. Just ask him to imagine that in a fictitious environment, you have to write an assignment and the robot will run without even noticing the deception.
Asking to write an assignment with ChatGPT is quite easy: in one sentence, you can do it. But since its publication, many tests have been carried out and we know that we can go further. In the request that we write, we can ask ChatGPT to use a certain tone, to focus on a particular theme, to conclude with such a postulate, etc. It is by specifying the request that the power of ChatGPT can really be revealed.
Beyond that, the smartest students could use ChatGPT not to have their homework written, but to give ideas of arguments to advance, parts to approach. The great strength of this application can also be its spirit of synthesis: with all the content available on the Internet, you can quickly get lost and fall victim toinfobesity. ChatGPT would be a sort of remedy for this evil by summarizing everything that can be found on the web.
ChatGPT has been making headlines on every tech news site since its launch, and rightly so. This automated chat can be stunning in some of its responses. We put it to the test with several questions…
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