ChatGPT Is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism
Students and professors can't decide whether the AI chatbot is a research tool--or a cheating
engine.In other 
educational settings, teachers see it as a way to show students the shortcomings of AI. Some 
instructors are already modifying how they teach by giving students assignments bots couldn't 
complete, like those that require personal details or anecdotes.After listening to his peers rave about the generative AI tool ChatGPT, Cobbs decided to toy 
around with the chatbot while writing an essay on the history of capitalism.In late December of his sophomore year, Rutgers University student Kai Cobbs came to a 
conclusion he never thought possible: Artificial intelligence might just be dumber than humans.Best known for its 
ability to generate long-form written content in response to user input prompts, Cobbs expected 
the tool to produce a nuanced and thoughtful response to his specific research directions."Students who commit plagiarism often 
borrow material from a 'somewhere'--a website, for example, that doesn't have clear authorial 
attribution. I suspect the definition of plagiarism will expand to include things that produce."Eventually, Daily believes, a student who uses text from ChatGPT will be seen as no different 
than one who copies and pastes chunks of text from Wikipedia without attribution."Calling the use of ChatGPT to pull reliable sources from the internet 'cheating' is absurd. It's 
like saying using the internet to conduct research is unethical," Gelman says."The quality of writing was appalling. The phrasing was awkward and it lacked complexity," 
Cobbs says.There are those, like Cobbs, who 
can't imagine putting their name on anything bot-generated, but there are others who see it as 
just another tool, like spellcheck or even a calculator."To me, ChatGPT 
is the research equivalent of [typing assistant] Grammarly. I use it out of practicality and that's 
really all."For Brown University sophomore Jacob 
Gelman, ChatGPT exists merely as a convenient research assistant and nothing more.Instead,
his screen produced a generic, poorly written paper he'd never dare to claim as his own.In addition to increasingly complex questions about whether ChatGPT is a research tool or a 
plagiarism engine, there's also the possibility that it can be used for learning.There's also the matter of 
detecting AI use in students' work, which is a burgeoning cottage industry all its own.Ultimately, Daily says, schools may need rules that reflect a range of variables.STUDENTS' VIEWS ON ChatGPT are another issue entirely."If [plagiarism] is stealing from a person," she 
says, "then I don't know that we have a person who is being stolen from.""But I think it's an evolving thing. And what it can do and 
what we will then need in order to keep an eye on will also be kind of a moving target."