Student Accused Of Plagiarism With ChatGPT Turns To Reddit For Help: Here's The Advice They Got

A student turned to Reddit for help after being accused of plagiarism by their for using OpenAI’s chatGPT to complete an assignment. 

What Happened: A Reddit user asked other Redditors for help after being “accused” by their school faculty of using chatGPT for an assignment. 

The essay topic was “To What Extent Would You Agree That Adolescence Is Automatically A Difficult Period For Development?” — which, according to the Redditor, was the “easiest question ever.”

The Redditor said it was “pretty ridiculous” that they were pulled up even after putting references and up to 31 sources because the school used Turnitin AI detection software. 

See Also: Google I/O 2023 Highlights AI Progress: PaLM 2 Challenges ChatGPT And Introduces Cutting-Edge AI-Powered Tools

While some Reddit suggestions did help, most of them were relatively aggressive and unrealistic, like telling them to go to the dean or take harsh actions.

However, some users said the Redditor’s professor wasn’t trying to fail them but to ensure that no one was cheating on their assignments. 

A Redditor, who identified as a teacher, said, “Can confirm that this is exploratory on the part of the teacher; the only way I’d press the student beyond a conversation would be if they were clearly being deceptive or manipulative, like claiming to not know what ChatGPT is.” 

Why It’s Important: The aforementioned post by the student highlights a more significant problem that AI-powered platforms like chatGPT’s inadvertent integration in the education system raise. 

Given the rapid expansion of generative AI platforms and the increasing possibility of students using these tools, educators are forced to use some technology that may or may not be effective at detecting AI-generated texts. 

In January this year, following concerns regarding the impact of AI-powered chatbots, chatGPT creator OpenAI, backed by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), launched a tool to help distinguish between human and AI-generated texts. 

However, the tool had certain limitations as the company itself said it is “very unreliable” on texts below 1,000 characters and could mislabel longer texts. 

Over the period, several tools like Turnitin AI have been developed, but the reliability of all these tools is uncertain. 

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