Image from Teaching Times

Stephen Hawking once said that “A.I is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen in humanity.” The development of Artificial Intelligence can be seen as a positive advancement because of its intended purpose of making our lives easier by processing information and predicting possible solutions, as well as commanding it to perform tasks that some of us don’t even have the capacity to accomplish. But with how fast it is advancing in terms of its intellectual capacity, our reliance on this technology grows stronger which is slowly affecting a lot of people’s work ethics negatively especially in academic institutions. 

Academic Integrity is a very important value that students shall uphold. It is defined as the act of honesty, trust, fairness, and responsibility in learning that can help teachers properly assess their capabilities and help them improve accordingly (Morris, 2018). Without academic integrity, the respective individual’s future is in danger not only because of the negative work ethics they have made into a habit, but their false credentials can set them up for serious failure in the workplace (Sparks, 2011). With the advancement of technology, academic integrity has recently been challenged by A.I because of numerous tools that have been developed and are easily accessible. 

To name a few, some of the A.I softwares commonly used by students in the Ateneo De Manila Senior High school are Grammarly, Google Translate and Quillbot which is mainly used for improving one’s quality of writing essays in terms of proper grammar, mechanics and overall tone. Mathway, Desmos and Photomath on the other hand are some of the applications used for solving math problems. There are of course a whole lot more examples to mention, but one software that has recently been developed that is slowly garnering a lot of students is called ChatGPT.

Described as the Jack of All trades, Master of None by The Decoder, ChatGPT is considered as the most advanced AI tool accessible to man right now (Schreiner, 2023). It has the ability to do all the things I have previously mentioned such as correct grammar, solve complex math problems to much more complex tasks such as developing codes and even a full page essay with just a prompt of a sentence. With its release in November last year, numerous cases have been reported worldwide of students exhibiting academic dishonesty with the use of ChatGPT. 

In January 2023, two students from University of the Philippines Diliman were investigated after they were suspected to use A.I, specifically ChatGPT, in accomplishing a major academic requirement. This accusation was made after their professor submitted their work through two AI detector systems to which the results stated that it was most likely written by an A.I (GMA News, 2023). 

A similar instance was reported in the same month wherein a philosophy professor from Furman University, located in South Carolina, caught a student’s submission to be entirely generated by an A.I. Just like what the teachers did in U.P, Professor Hick ran it through ChatGPT’s AI detector in which the results came back with a 99% statistic of the paper being written by an A.I. Another important measure Professor Hick mentioned is that there are numerous red flags in detecting papers that are AI generated. From concepts not mentioned in their class being used in the output, to their overall tone of writing which they believe was way beyond their level. 

With the rising cases of academic dishonesty being exhibited through the use of ChatGPT, numerous schools have expressed their concerns regarding this artificial intelligence. The field of Law has also been intimidated because of how ChatGPT-4, which is being released this year, is reported to have a 90% chance of passing the bar exam when engineers of Open-AI, the company behind the creation of  ChatGPT, gave it a mock exam. 

These are some of the reasons why I believe that the advancements of Artificial Intelligence may pose a threat to the academic integrity of students. With the continuous advancement of this technology which will only get smarter and smarter, there is one important thing that I would like everyone to take note of. 

With the state of our reliance with this advancement, we shall not depend on our entire submission on what the A.I writes for us not only for the sake of integrity, but for the purpose of learning. Being intelligent naturally is different from being artificially intelligent because how will we develop our intellect, skills and capabilities if we depend on A.I for everything that we do.