With the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), students have been carrying out the writing of their essays. Tools such as OpenAI’s Playground are often used and are very difficult to distinguish from a text written by a person. More and more teachers have begun to show this concern about the use of these AI models by students. In addition, this situation is extending to all tasks and in all years, from secondary school onwards.
A user of the social network Reddit was contacted by the portal Motherboard with the intention of finding out about this new use of AI. The university student, whose nickname is “innovate_rye” stated that “simple tasks that include extended responses” are generated. Expanding on his look, the Reddit user commented that “for biology, we would learn about biotech and type in five good and bad things about biotech. I would send a prompt to the AI like, ‘what are five good and bad things about biotech’ and it would generate a response that would give me an A.”
Technology in the service of students
For innovate_rye, if AI could not be counted on, the task would be considered drudgery. While with the technological tools, it can be done in twenty minutes, in another more manual way we are facing two hours of academic work. Reddit user says:
“Being able to do it faster and more efficiently seems like a skill to me. I like to learn a lot [and] sometimes the school work I’ve done before makes me procrastinate and not turn in homework.”
More and more students have approached OpenAI’s proposal. Once it introduced its latest application programming interface (API) for its widely used language model, GPT-3. This has led to students entering written messages into OpenAI’s Playground and other similar programs. The results are becoming more and more natural and cannot be distinguished from a text produced by a person.
The use of technology from an early age
More and more high school students have decided to use AI for the completion of their assignments. An example of this is user AeUsako_ who used OpenAI in his essay on issues related to the contemporary world. Although the work was not approved, because it lost points due to the lack of citations from external sources, it was learned that plagiarism verification algorithms do not detect texts generated by Artificial Intelligence. This user, who was also contacted by Motherboard, explained that “because I used Open AI, I didn’t feel the constant anxiety of having to concentrate all the time on writing it.”
On this topic, George Veletsianos, Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology and associate professor at Royal Roads University, said that the texts generated by the OpenAI API system are technically original. It is still unclear whether the companies that produce these tools have the ability to detect or prevent students from using these programs for school or college assignments.
