Since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, the landscape of the writing world and, more critically, academia has changed rapidly. Smart students use it to produce assignments with additional information. Less smart students misuse it to write assignments given by lecturers without thinking twice.
Last year, Haishan Yang, a master's student, was expelled from the University of Minnesota for allegedly using ChatGPT to write essays. The university found that his ability to produce three essays in eight hours while on vacation in Morocco confirmed that artificial intelligence (AI) was used.
Yang is now suing the University of Minnesota for allegedly cheating. Among the reasons he gave was that the essays he submitted appeared to be written by AI because ChatGPT was used to do spell checking. Any similarities in his essay and the essay generated when the lecturer entered the same question into ChatGPT, according to Yang, are because he used the same source. Therefore, the lawsuit was filed because "there was a conspiracy to expel him from the university".
The university insists that the action they took was the right one. Especially after one of the submitted essays contained a phrase that sounded like a prom asking ChatGPT to produce a more casual piece of work, as if written by an overseas student.
The issue of using AI to generate essays for class assignments is an issue that will only get worse as newer models become more intelligent and human-like in their writing, making them harder to detect. Amazon has thousands of books written by AI, prompting the Authors Guild of America to create an official verification logo for books written by humans last month.