Is using AI cheating?

Is using AI cheating? Well, it was a trick question. Using artificial intelligence to do your assignments and essays is definitely cheating.

How this came about

Last week I was sitting in the staff room, doing work, and since it’s all open plan, I can hear everyone’s conversations.

I heard one young teacher (early twenties) tell some of the older teachers how he uses Chatbot GPT to prepare lessons and such, and he gave them a demonstration.

They lost their minds.

It really is great, because it saves you so much time. I haven’t used it to write lesson plans, because I’m a support teacher, but I recently used it to translate a document and it was great. It gave a 95% accurate translation, and I honestly did not have to change that much.

However, with great power comes great responsibility.

The problem

I work in Australia, and all the school students work on laptops in the classrooms. Hence, usually, when the teacher sets a task, it’s done on Teams or something similar.

I’ve noticed in these last few weeks that many kids don’t even bother to write their own ideas, they just go to an AI website and paste the question in there. Within seconds, they have an answer, but what do they learn?

They learn fuck all.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t read the question properly before they went to the AI website, and I’m also certain that they didn’t read the answer before conveniently pasting it into their worksheet.

So many problems arise from this because not only do the students become lazy, but they don’t learn critical thinking skills. Also, most students are already poor writers, so they also don’t practice their writing.

Interestingly enough, Chatbot GPT has already been banned in New York public schools precisely because it’s detrimental to students’ learning.

One of these days, students will all be forced to go back to pen and paper.

How can you detect AI cheating?

These days, AI websites can generate text that reads as if a real person wrote it. The text quality has seriously improved in the last couple of years. Obviously, this also makes it so much easier for students in school or university to cheat. Academic integrity is already halfway out the door.

Many schools and universities already use programs like Turnitin to pick up plagiarism and other copying, but if an AI website generates a fresh response to a prompt every time, how can you tell if it’s AI-generated?

Lastly

I am just baffled. It’s amazing and terrifying that we have gotten to this point. Anyway, what do you think about this issue?

Meh.

Michelle

P.S. If you’d like to contact me, feel free to comment below, send an email to thatmichelleperson@gmail.com, or follow me on Twitter @M_ClutterBox.