LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. — Now that colleges and universities are back in session, the issue of artificial intelligence has educators debating about what constitutes plagiarism.
Programs such as ChatGPT are making it more difficult to determine what content is AI-generated and what is man-made. Because of this, some educators are determined to implement anti-ChatGPT rules in classrooms.
ChatGPT or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer is a model-based chatbot used to provide human-like responses to input commands. The program can be used for various purposes outside education. For students, it can be seen as a convenience to writing papers. For educators like Dr. Chuck Ward, Professor of Philosophy at Millersville University, it can be seen as cheating.
“They’re not engaged in the kind of intellectual labor that I want them to be engaged in,” said Ward.
AI programs like ChatGPT continue to spark debate about academic integrity. But because of how recently the program has become involved in the classroom, anti-ChatGPT measures aren’t as developed as other anti-plagiarist programs. Rather than fight it, Dr. Ward believes ChatGPT should be explored by educators.
“I think we have to find ways of integrating it into what we’re doing but the hard thing is to figure out how to do that and still get students engaged in that intellectual labor that’s going to benefit them in the long run,” said Ward.
Dr. Ward says it’s about finding the balance between AI and human effort. He has used AI in his classroom as part of his curriculum, even offering students the opportunity to use programs like ChatGPT to complete other assignments.
According to Dr. Ward, his use of ChatGPT in the classroom isn’t to promote cheating, but rather to promote proactive ways to use AI that still involve cognitive effort.
“You need to find ways to integrate it into the course activities in a way that is still going to promote learning and not just replace learning, described Ward.
One way to maintain balance is avoiding over-reliance on AI to complete work. A second way to maintain balance is to use AI to check for grammatical errors within papers. A third way is to use a second AI to monitor the first.
Dr. Ward says it will likely take several years for educators to determine which student assignments are the product of AI and which are not. It is unlikely for AI to be completely removed from a classroom setting, regardless of any parameters a school might set.