Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers

innovate_rye’s professors know them as a first-year biochemistry major, and an “A” student. What their professors don’t know about them is that they’re using a powerful AI language model to finish most homework assignments.

“It would be simple assignments that included extended responses,” innovate_rye, who asked to use their Reddit handle to avoid detection by their college, told Motherboard. “For biology, we would learn about biotech and write five good and bad things about biotech. I would send a prompt to the AI like, ‘what are five good and bad things about biotech?’ and it would generate an answer that would get me an A.”

“I like to learn a lot [and] sometimes schoolwork that I have done before makes me procrastinate and not turn in the assignment,” innovate_rye explains. “Being able to do it faster and more efficient seems like a skill to me.”

innovate_rye isn’t alone. Since OpenAI unveiled the latest application programming interface (API) for its widely-used language model, GPT-3, more students have begun feeding written prompts into OpenAI’s Playground and similar programs that use deep learning to generate text. The results continue the initial prompt in a natural-sounding way, and often can’t be distinguished from human-written text.

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