It’s free, fast, polyglot and excellent pen: how to dissuade students around the world from having their homework written by the revolutionary ChatGPT robot? A French company, specializing in the detection of plagiarism, has its idea.
The stunning success of this software launched in November by OpenAI, an American start-up, has caused a stir in universities, who fear that the temptation to make him write unsupervised work is too strong. A number of establishments have already banned its use and resistance is gradually being organized.
The small company Compilatio, near Annecy, in the French Alps, seized their chance. She has shaken up her priorities and is working to quickly develop artificial intelligence (AI) detection software for universities.
Launched in 2003, it has for years provided teachers with anti-plagiarism software that flushes out copied and pasted passages. Marketed in several languages in around forty countries, it equips, according to her, 98% of French universities.
When ChatGPT appeared, “teachers turned to us because it is a new form of cheating, it is a case of plagiarism”, indicates its president and founder, Frédéric Agnès. “Today any student, anywhere in the world, can produce a twenty-page assignment in five minutes.”
Compilatio has a technology that allows “to detect in several languages and with more than 90% reliability the distinction IA / human”, he underlines. A demonstrator on its site allows you to experience it: tested with an AFP dispatch, the software detected “with 99% reliability (a human text).
A good part of the thirty employees of the group, including several doctors in computer science, work on the software, currently still in “kitchen mode”.
“Within two months, we will be able to consider having a first version”, explains the product manager, Laure Chabat.
“We feel that there is a fear of customers. Providing them with a solution means preventing them from having to find the solution elsewhere,” she points out.
“We don’t think like that”
ChatGPT was designed to produce the most probable text possible in a given context, much like the “Complete the sentence” tool of search engines, only more powerful. “He does it so well that we find it magical,” says Mr. Agnès.
OpenAI launched its own free-to-use AI detection tool in February but acknowledges that it is not entirely reliable at this stage.
How to tell the difference then? “A human does not think like that, he has imperfections,” notes Mr. Agnès.
The detection system, also based on artificial intelligence, will therefore consist of “measuring the predictability of the text, its level of language, the width of the semantic field, indicators that we humans will not be able to measure, but which produce a signal”, explains the entrepreneur.
But beyond the “game of technological cat and mouse”, Compilatio is committed to providing support and promoting a culture of “integrity in institutions, more than tapping the fingers of students”, insists Mr. Agnes.
“Embrace our century”
Anti-plagiarism software has proven itself, abounds Alain Gay, teacher at the ISARA engineering school, also coordinator of the technical group on plagiarism at the University of Lyon, in the south-east of France.
Their mere existence has caused “in 2-3 years a phenomenal drop in the use of copy-paste” among students, he underlines.
“With ChatGPT, we don’t yet know exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to maintain the same logic: training first and then detection and repression, if necessary,” he continues.
Thomas Capron, 2nd year student at ISARA, uses ChatGPT “on a daily basis”. “It allows good research, precise and concise, on notions of course […]. But using it to do a full homework is not very constructive,” he admits.
Teachers can always have recourse to supervised homework, tempers Yann Demarigny, microbiologist, teacher-researcher at ISARA. ” You do not have to be afraid. It is a tool that will enrich our pedagogy,” he believes.
“It is up to us to embrace our century and adapt […] I think that we will also find positive, constructive aspects for the training of our young people”, concludes Mr. Gay.