Educators worry about students using artificial intelligence to cheat

PBS NewsHour

January 14, 2023

Earlier this month, New York City public schools blocked access to the popular artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. Educators are concerned that students could use this technology to write papers – the tool wasn’t even a month old when a college professor in South Carolina caught a student using it to write an essay in philosophy class. Darren Hick of Furman University joins John Yang to discuss.

John Yang:

When the New York Public School District blocked access to the popular artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT earlier this month, it was the latest response to concerns over how rapidly changing technology is effecting our lives. Educators worry that students are using this technology to write papers and that they’ll never have to learn how to write on their own.

The tool wasn’t even a month old when a college professor caught a student using it to write an essay for her philosophy class. Darren Hick Furman University wrote about that on his Facebook page. And he’s with us now for our periodic series, the AI Frontier.

Professor Hick, what were the red flags. This was an essay for the record about Scottish Philosopher, David Hume. And the paradox of her, as you were reading this essay, what were the red flags that this might have been other than her own product?

Darren Hick, Furman University:

There’s several red flags that come up. And in any case of plagiarism. They just sort of build up until you have to screech the grading to a halt and look into the problem. In this case, it got some basic issues exactly right. Other things fundamentally wrong. It talks about things that the student wouldn’t have learned about in class, which is always something of a flag and connected things together in a way that was just thoroughly wrong. But it was beautifully written. Well, beautifully for a college take home exam, anyway. So, it was a weird collection of flags.

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