[Ads-l] Article: A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat (Slate)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Educators on this mailing list may find it helpful to know that Large
Language Models (LLM) like Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3
(GPT-3) can be used by a student to help generate a writing
assignment. See the excerpt from the Slate article below. Follow the
link to see the full article.

An aside: “Large Language Model” is a terrible name. Computer
technology is still improving rapidly; hence, a “large language model”
of today will be considered a “very small language model” in the
future.

Website: Slate
Article: A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat
Author: Aki Peritz
Date: September 6, 2022

https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/ai-students-writing-cheating-sudowrite.html

[Begin excerpt]
Look out, educators. You’re about to confront a pernicious new
challenge that is spreading, kudzu-like, into your student writing
assignments: papers augmented with artificial intelligence.

The first online article generator debuted in 2005. Now,
A.I.-generated text can now be found in novels, fake news articles and
real news articles, marketing campaigns, and dozens of other written
products. The tech is either free or cheap to use, which places it in
the hands of anyone. And it’s probably already burrowing into
America’s classrooms right now.

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. Instead, a
student first feeds text from either a single or multiple sources into
the program to begin the process. The program then generates content
by using a set of parameters on a topic, which then can be
personalized to the writer’s specifications. With a little bit of
practice, a student can use AI to write his or her paper in a fraction
of the time that it would normally take to write an essay.
[End excerpt]

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