ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence application, raises troubling questions about authorship and the ability to spot plagiarism in academic work. The app also poses a challenge to the learning process itself. Quebec universities should pay particular attention to this.
This text-generating app was created by the OpenAI Foundation, initially funded by flamboyant tech mogul Elon Musk. According to OpenAI, “the dialog format allows ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
The app, currently offered for free, is capable of combing the Internet to find samples of content hosted on the current 50 billion web pages in the world (as indexed by Google), then aggregate them — at a glance — in a new structured and apparently original text.
So far, one university in Arizona has rated a job generated by ChatGPT as deserving of a high rating. The app also generated free opinion for a London daily.
Is this disruptive technology likely to transform the profession of author, which requires so much effort, discipline, rigor, love of language and ability to communicate? Doesn’t the spontaneous genesis of text risk becoming an intellectual game, as if the user, without great effort, were dancing with a fantasy?
Is ChatGPT an insidious new form of plagiarism, “copyright laundering”, which allows users to appropriate the intellectual property of others?
While teaching history, creative writing, and English as a second language in an academic setting, and as an author, I encountered five types of plagiarism.
There is what I would call fairy tale plagiarism, when a person submits successive works in radically different, but neat, writing styles, while deploying a rich and varied vocabulary that they would never use. orally. I wonder if this kind of person secretly dreams of being caught.
There is complacent plagiarism, when a person saves many documents written by other people, then merges them into a single word processing file, before republishing extracts under his name, all the while “forgetting” to recognize the source of these borrowings.
There’s rampant plagiarism, when someone fetches content online, at the speed of light, while making some superficial edits to hide their tracks, but forgetting to remove the hyperlinks that appear in the original document. . This person may have assumed that I would just take a quick look at the work instead of analyzing it in detail.
There is also the plagiarism-scam: I remember a Montreal publisher who digitized each page of a book published in France, in order to be able to republish it in Quebec without negotiating publication rights.
There’s also a more insidious form of plagiarism, which is — and has been for a long time — picking up half-sentences here and there, from various print sources and on the web, and then merging them into one. patchwork almost undetectable content. This last form of plagiarism takes a lot of work — maybe even more than writing the text in the first place!
ChatGPT can be compared to this last form of plagiarism, except that it automates the process of collecting content and rearranging it, as if the work of creation consisted in manipulating interpretations already made by others. other people.
The application therefore represents quite a challenge for learning in a university setting.
What is the point, especially in social studies courses, of requiring students to research and write papers, if a technology is able to help them circumvent the current checks and balances, simply by clicking the “Enter” key?
In fact, university education is not only focused on the transmission of knowledge and skills: the primary objectives of a university education are to learn to think critically, and above all to learn to learn. It is to be hoped that this experience of reflection and learning does not stop once the diploma is obtained!
Given the current climate of pessimism across the Western world, it may seem tempting to sketch doomsday scenarios.
What is really needed is more personal interaction, supervised class work, including writing assignments. Perhaps more attention needs to be paid to oral communication.
A new form of authentication of originality may be required, such as the submission of successive drafts of work.
After all, something vital is at stake, which should concern all educators in Quebec: the real value of a university education.