These are papers that are generated by a chatbot when fed a prompt. Chatbots may spit out text that looks "good enough" to turn in, but to professors, it looks sort of like art generated by AI:
At first glance, these images look fine, but look closer: why does she have so many fingers? Is that actually a word? What's wrong with her face?
In the same way, generated papers can create a blurry representation of an academic paper. However, the paper will be hollow, vague, and rely on a lot of overly complicated transitional words. It will also be unable to address the actual prompt. The details your professor asks assigns are often just too... human.
Submitting a generated essay will have your professor squinting at your paper and looking closer, asking: "Why is this only a third of the word count? Why is this paragraph missing? What's going on with the repetitive sentences here? What's wrong with this paper? "
This means that if your professor doesn't "catch" a generated paper, it will likely miss the prompt in several areas and receive a low score anyways.
Check out this example generated paper. (This paper would fail. Can you guess why?)
Your professor doesn't have to bother wondering if a paper is generated, just as she doesn't have to wonder if a paper is plagiarized. For plagiarism, she uses Turnitin. For AI, she can now use something like ZeroGPT or GPT Zero to detect whether or not a sentence, paragraph, or whole essay was likely written by AI. (Update: Turnitin now also detects AI).
Watch this professor detect text written by AI:
In addition, your professor may require you to write in Google Docs, which shows time stamps for every keystroke and edit created. Papers written by humans will most likely show text being edited and written over weeks, with no large chunks of text showing up at once.
So how you CAN use bots like ChatGPT in the classroom? There are lots of ways a chatbot can help without writing your whole essay for you. See below for ideas and examples!
Here, we've asked ChatGPT to give us feedback on a student essay covering a Hindu temple
Generate practice quizzes, translate languages, explain equations, write emails, as a thesaurus... try it out!
generate a syllabus, lecture notes, and study guides; provide assignment feedback; provide definitions and explanations for students; provide presentation feedback, etc. Try it out!
For the amount of work a student would need to do to evade detection, is a generated paper worth possibly failing a course or being expelled? No, probably not. But could you use it as a tutor for all your classes? Yes!
AI is new and still unfolding in ways we can't predict. However, it's not going away and we will probably need to have policies in place surrounding it. If you're concerned about plagiarism, try the generator detector link above, or have students writing in Google Docs, which use timestamps for every edit.
Perplexity: answers questions but cites where the information came from. Good for research.
Curipod: generates interactive slide decks from existing Google slides.
Fireflies: transcribes videos and conversations.
Eduaide: generates different types of lesson plans, rubrics, games, and tests.
ParlayIdeas: discussion prompt generator based on videos, articles, or subjects.
QuestionWell: generates questions based on text, videos, or websites.
Conker: generates quizzes that can be exported to Google forms
For an updated list and guidelines for use, visit the Aims AI page
Read AI (an AI-powered meeting assistant)