Lakhasly

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 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.
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. 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. Instead,
his screen produced a generic, poorly written paper he’d never dare to claim as his own.
“The quality of writing was appalling. The phrasing was awkward and it lacked complexity,”
Cobbs says. “I just logically can’t imagine a student using writing that was generated through
ChatGPT for a paper or anything when the content is just plain bad.”
Not everyone shares Cobbs’ disdain. Ever since OpenAI launched the chatbot in November,
educators have been struggling with how to handle a new wave of student work produced with
the help of artificial intelligence. While some public school systems, like New York City’s, have
banned the use of ChatGPT on school devices and networks to curb cheating, universities have
been reluctant to follow suit. In higher education, the introduction of generative AI has raised
thorny questions about the definition of plagiarism and academic integrity on campuses where
new digital research tools come into play all the time.
Make no mistake, the birth of ChatGPT does not mark the emergence of concerns relating to the
improper use of the internet in academia. When Wikipedia launched in 2001, universities
nationwide were scrambling to decipher their own research philosophies and understandings of
honest academic work, expanding policy boundaries to match pace with technological
innovation. Now, the stakes are a little more complex, as schools figure out how to treat
botproduced work rather than weird attributional logistics. The world of higher education is
playing a familiar game of catch-up, adjusting their rules, expectations, and perceptions as other
professions adjust, too. The only difference now is that the internet can think for itself.
According to ChatGPT, the definition of plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work or
ideas without giving proper credit to the original author. But when the work is generated by
something rather than someone, this definition is tricky to apply. As Emily Hipchen, a board
member of Brown University’s Academic Code Committee, puts it, the use of generative AI by
students leads to a critical point of contention. “If [plagiarism] is stealing from a person,” she
says, “then I don’t know that we have a person who is being stolen from.”
Hipchen is not alone in her speculation. Alison Daily, chair of the Academic Integrity Program
at Villanova University, is also grappling with the idea of classifying an algorithm as a person,
specifically if the algorithm involves text generation.
Daily believes that eventually professors and students are going to need to understand that digital
tools that generate text, rather than just collect facts, are going to need to fall under the umbrella
of things that can be plagiarized from.
Although Daily acknowledges that this technological growth incites new concerns in the world
of academia, she doesn’t find it to be a realm entirely unexplored. “I think we’ve been in a
version of this territory for a while already,” Daily says. “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.
STUDENTS’ VIEWS ON ChatGPT are another issue entirely. 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. For Brown University sophomore Jacob
Gelman, ChatGPT exists merely as a convenient research assistant and nothing more.
“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. “To me, ChatGPT
is the research equivalent of [typing assistant] Grammarly. I use it out of practicality and that’s
really all.” Cobbs expressed a similar sentiment, comparing the AI bot to “an online
encyclopedia.”
But while students like Gelman use the bot to speed up research, others take advantage of the
high-capacity prompt input feature to generate completed works for submission. It might seem
obvious what qualifies as cheating here, but different schools across the country offer contrasting
takes.
According to Carlee Warfield, chair of Bryn Mawr College’s Student Honor Board, the school
considers any use of these AI platforms as plagiarism. The tool’s popularization just calls for
greater focus in evaluating the intent behind students’ violations. Warfield explains that students
who turn in essays entirely produced by AI are categorically different from those who borrow
from online tools without knowledge of standard citations. Because the ChatGPT phenomenon is
still new, students’ confusion surrounding the ethics is understandable. And it's unclear what
policies will remain in place once the dust settles—at any school.
In the midst of fundamental change in both the academic and technological spheres, universities
are forced to reconsider their definitions of academic integrity to reasonably reflect the
circumstances of society. The only problem is, society shows no stagnance.
“Villanova’s current academic integrity code will be updated to include language that prohibits
the use of these tools to generate text that then students represent as text they generated
independently,” Daily explained. “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.”
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. 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. 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.
“My guess is that there will be the development of some broad blanket policies that essentially
say, unless you have permission from a professor to use AI tools, using them will be considered
a violation of the academic integrity code,” Daily says. “That then gives faculty broad latitude to
use it in their teaching or in their assignments, as long as they are stipulating explicitly that they
are allowing it.”
As for ChatGTP, the program agrees. “Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence are
expected to drive significant innovation in the coming years,” it says, when asked how schools
can combat academic dishonesty. “Schools should constantly review and update their academic
honor codes as technology evolves to ensure they are addressing the current ways in which
technology is being used in academic settings.”
But, a bot would say that.