AI and the Changing Face of Plagiarism

As a retired professor of ESL, I have been watching developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few years with interest, particularly ChatGPT, which is a chatbot and virtual assistant. OpenAI, which spawned ChatGPT, was founded in December 2015; ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. The pace of change in our contemporary world is absolutely astounding!

One area related to AI which has been of particular interest to me is plagiarism. As I thought about it, I realized that plagiarism can be roughly divided into three eras: pre-1995; 1995-late 2002; and late 2002-present. I suppose that plagiarism has been around as long as colleges and universities have been in existence. We can roughly define it as including the ideas of others in your writing (or speaking) without giving credit to them. When I was in college, we were warned of the consequences of plagiarism, including possible expulsion; therefore, we were taught how to cite others whose ideas we were using. This included using others’ exact words (which required quotes but should be done sparingly) as well as paraphrasing the ideas of others; either way, we had a healthy fear of the consequences of not citing. (A side note: several years later when I was teaching in a Third World country, I discovered that my students were freely plagiarizing; when I talked to them about it, they had a very hard time understanding it because in their culture, using the ideas of famous writers without citation was good and right! I had to adjust how I thought about it.)

The launch of Windows 95 marked a sea change in society, as the Internet became widely available and accessible. Along with it came early search engines, such as WebCrawler and Lycos. Three years later, Google was launched, and there continue to be other search engines as well, such as DuckDuckGo. On the one hand, search engines made plagiarizing easy for students; they could simply copy and paste from a given website. However, the danger was that suspicious professors could do a search themselves to detect possible plagiarism, as some of my own students discovered! In one of my classes (in the U.S.), without revealing the perpetrator, I showed the class an essay and the website from which it was copied, word for word. Interestingly, the perpetrator spoke up and admitted her “crime.” Since I hadn’t said much, if anything, to this class about plagiarism yet, I gave her a 50% on it, but it was now very clear to the class what plagiarism was.

As I alluded to at the outset, ChatGPT has been around a mere year and eight months; among other things, it has ushered in a whole new kind of plagiarism, with a twist. Students can use ChatGPT to essentially write paragraphs and essays; what it produces is an amalgamation of ideas from various sources. I have seen some examples of what ChatGPT produces, and it often looks “stilted,” meaning that it lacks individuality and sounds rather robotic. Turnitin (created in 1998) is a tool widely used by teachers to help them determine whether a student has plagiarized. And now, it has an AI Writing Indicator, which is a percentage indicating the likelihood that a student’s writing was AI-generated. In fact, to make it even better, the portion(s) of the writing that are “suspicious” are highlighted. This is a great tool for professors! However, proving plagiarism is more difficult than when a student (like mine, above) simply copies and pastes. At the same time, ChatGPT users need to be careful because of a phenomenon called “hallucinating.” This is when the writing contains factual errors and sometimes outright nonsense. Thus, if students are using ChatGPT to quickly produce something without checking and editing the product, the plagiarism can be very obvious.

Last year, a designer of ChatGPT reported that he told it to write WhatsApp messages using his unique writing style (including emojis); only 10% of his friends were fooled into thinking that he had written them. Similarly, after seeing multiple examples of a student’s writing, professors come to know a student’s “voice” to some degree. If you’ve taken composition classes, particularly at more advanced levels, you’ve probably heard professors talking about developing your own “voice” as a writer, meaning that each writer has his or her own unique style. One of my favorite examples of this is when a student of mine included this sentence in her narrative essay: “My husband lost his smile.” That is truly a wonderful sentence, expressing something unique that I doubt a chatbot could ever produce.

I have to admit that I’m glad I retired when I did, for numerous reasons; one of them is ChatGPT. If I were still teaching, one thing I would do is significantly increase in-class writing, using a pencil and no electronic device. I would also put a stronger emphasis on citing, depending on the level of the ESL class I was teaching. When students have to cite, using ChatGPT becomes more difficult.

I suppose it sounds like I am very down on AI and its applications. Actually, I understand that it has many amazing uses, including robotics, most obviously. And over the decades, I have enjoyed a lot of good sci-fi in books and movies that include AI! I also understand that AI has wonderful applications in many sectors of society; health care is one obvious example.

Since my blog is focused on Biblical answers to questions and issues, what does the Bible have to say about plagiarism? I think that both the eighth and ninth commandments apply here. Exodus 20:15-16 tell us, “You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” When students plagiarize, in essence they are stealing someone’s ideas because they are not giving them credit for it. They are also in essence lying by implying, “This is my work” when it’s not.

AI, including ChatGPT, has made our world more complicated, certainly including when it comes to plagiarism. Teachers can instruct their students about it and urge them not to do it, but some are going to plagiarize, regardless. Thankfully, there are tools and strategies to help teachers deal with it. May we who claim the name of Christ not plagiarize, and may we instruct our kids why they shouldn’t do it, either.

A final note: I never use AI when writing anything, including my blog posts. If I ever get to the point where I can no longer write clearly, I will simply stop writing them!