AI-Generated Content: Plagiarism or Not?

It is not possible to stay neutral in heated debates about the innovation that has turned present-day life and especially the system of academics upside down. Is AI ethical? Do you believe the text is absolutely plagiarized if it is generated by chat GPT or any other tool like that? Which issues with AI make you be apprehensive of using the outputs of artificial not human intelligence? Just fancy all school papers are composed by the latest tools instead of the students. Everybody gets the highest grades and saves a huge amount of time. It sounds like a dream! Still, it is natural to assume that this paradise for a student will soon bring a lot of threats to academic integrity and eventually ruin it altogether. Agree?

AI-Powered Plagiarism in Students’ Assignments: Plague or Minor Issue?

According to the results of one of the recent surveys conducted among the college students, about 50% of them state that using AI tools is equal to cheating in studies. Nevertheless, at least 20 % of the students admit that they tried using some of those tools and keep doing that.

Survey Results:

• About half of the students have tried using AI applications for some reason, including the exams and school tasks to complete.
• About 20% of the respondents did not do their writing tasks themselves, using AI tools instead.
• About 50% of the students claim that they will never complete their school assignments with the help of AI.
• One third of respondents know that the use of AI tools is under prohibition in schools.
• About two-thirds of the students claim that their instructors have never discussed the use of Chat GPT or other AI tools with them; so, they are not aware of any ethical concerns or responsibility for using them.
• More than 60% of the students believe that AI tools will have numerous applications in the future.

Tools like Chat GPT make professors worry over the quality of education not only of the next generations exposed to various AI tools, but also in the nearest years. As for the students, they are looking for the ways to get their tasks done with little or even no effort taken.

Is Chat GPT Plagiarism? Students’ View

For sure, every school nowadays faces a lot of problems related to academic integrity and the number of issues is growing fast. Every fifth student admits using AI resources in assignments and this statistics is going to change dramatically. For now, a lot of users view Chat GPT or similar tools as source of fun and entertainment, but for others it is a helper and a ‘writer’. Some students claim that they are not going to cheat with their papers, using the artificial intelligence, but if they make an attempt and it is successful, they will most probably try again to enjoy all the benefits.

The surveys show that students are certain that if they use AI assistance wisely, no instructor can tell that the writing is generated automatically. Undetectable plagiarism creates a huge problem for colleges and universities and it is tempting for the students to save their effort and time and get ready-made answers which in most cases are true. Still, most of the students say that it is important to double check the accuracy of the given answers as it is the prerequisite of high grades and positive comments of the professors.

So, the formula of success is a sum of using AI tools and taking effort to check the answers and submit them only after the student is sure that there is no mistake in the text.

Is Using AI Plagiarism? Professors’ View

Unfortunately, the prospects of using AI tools change the purpose of education and value of theoretical knowledge. Professors are greatly concerned about the impact of new technologies on future careers and society in general. Another major concern is related to a possibility of replacing the creativity and intelligence of people with artificial capabilities.

Instructors say that the students are mostly proficient in using new techs, but those with poor skills cannot use the AI tools so that the answers looked human. They are worried about the perspectives of getting the new normal out of generating pre-trained answers.

Major concerns are:

• using new technologies to submit the content generated by AI tools as the students’ own work;
• low level of readiness in colleges to combat new cheating methods;
• necessity to get back to oral exams and class written tasks to determine the level of knowledge of students.

To address the negative consequences of using Chat GPT by students, schools need a powerful AI plagiarism checker which can be compared to PlagiarismSearch.com in terms of efficiency. The latter can trace plagiarism in its conventional sense, but a new checker should be able to differentiate between the outputs of human and artificial creativity and intelligence. No one doubts that the essay composed by Chat GPT and submitted to the university professor for grading is a case of plagiarism. Students realize that getting answers without exerting any efforts at all is cheating which is equal to copy-pasting the text from someone’s research without references.

Development of new mitigations is an urgent need to let everyone identify the content generated by creative AI tools. Although there are some detection programs which let the users know the likelihood of using AI programs in producing the texts, the analysis is not sufficiently profound. Therefore, its results are not enough to prove that a student plagiarized in the assignment with the help of AI. All programs can be used for ill and for good. Cheating is universal and unfortunately, for education, AI tools seem to be ruining with no good produced so far. It is actually the same as it was with calculators which brought a lot of harm to teaching math. AI programs bring another challenge to educators and it is time to adapt to that and find new solutions.