Using an A.I. program is not “plagiarism” in the traditional sense—there's no previous work for the student to copy, and thus no original for teachers' plagiarism detectors to catch. 

The latest AI Writing Engine:  Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3; stylized GPT·3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt.

AI Written Content Checkers:

(For additional ways to detect potential cheating, please visit)

https://sites.google.com/view/reducecheating/tech-tools-to-catch-them

What Teachers Can Do Today

The good news is that there are many things instructors can do today to prepare for this likelihood.

1. Talk with Students About Writing Tools: Simply use the tools students use every day, ask them to think about their relationship with them. Ask specific questions such as “Who is responsible if your grammar checker makes a mistake?” or “If your word processor changes a sentence, did you write that sentence or did it?” Get students to think about how they are in control when writing their papers and why that’s important. This can be framed as the line between writer and editor and when AI crosses that line. 

2. Authorship Integrity Tools: AI is going to make authorship integrity a much bigger part of any academic integrity plan. Some tools begin to have have authorship capabilities that can detect changes in student’s writing, even if it’s not traditional plagiarism. Incorporating these tools now can not only help educators guard against some key integrity issues of today, such as contract cheating, but also against those issues likely on the horizon.

3. Structure Assignments Carefully: As with other academic integrity issues, certain assignment types are more resistant to shortcut-taking than others. An assignment with an in-classroom portion, for example, isn’t nearly as easy for an AI to create as a paper written outside of class. Choosing topics that are more specific, or even personal can also help. Notably, at this juncture with remote learning and online instruction more abundant than ever, individualized assignments may be trickier to assign.

Teachers can also structure assignments in such a way that the AI writing models can’t mimic currently. For instance, a student could be required to show an outline and other work documenting how an assignment progressed. Or teachers might structure assignments in the form of a dialogue, forcing each student to respond to inputs from another student. 

However, Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein believe this places the emphasis on teachers when the tech companies that create and release this technology should do more to safeguard against its misuse.  The back and forth battle for authenticity will continue.  

AI technology is rapidly evolving, so students and educators alike should work to understand how it might be used and its impact on classroom learning.