Skip to main content

Here’s how ChatGPT could solve its major plagiarism problem

ChatGPT is a wonderful tool but there’s a dark side to this advanced AI service that can write like an expert on almost any topic — plagiarism. When students that are supposed to be demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of a topic cheat by secretly using ChatGPT, it invalidates testing and grading. AI skills are great but aren’t the only subject that students should learn.

Policing this problem has proven to be difficult. Since ChatGPT has been trained on a vast dataset of human writing, it’s nearly impossible for an instructor to identify whether an essay was created by a student or a machine. Several tools have been created that attempt to recognize AI-generated writing, but the accuracy was too low to be useful.

Amidst rising concerns from educators and bans on students using ChatGPT, Business Insider reports that OpenAI is working on a solution to this problem. A recent tweet from Tom Goldstein, Associate Professor of machine learning at the University of Maryland, explained how accurate it might be at detecting watermarked text that’s written by ChatGPT.

#OpenAI is planning to stop #ChatGPT users from making social media bots and cheating on homework by "watermarking" outputs. How well could this really work? Here's just 23 words from a 1.3B parameter watermarked LLM. We detected it with 99.999999999994% confidence. Here's how 🧵 pic.twitter.com/pVC9M3qPyQ

— Tom Goldstein (@tomgoldsteincs) January 25, 2023

Any tool that could identify plagiarism with nearly 100% accuracy would settle this discussion quickly and alleviate any concerns. According to Goldstein, one solution is to make the large language model (LLM) pick from a limited vocabulary of words, forming a whitelist that is okay for the AI to use and a blacklist of words that are forbidden. If an unnaturally large number of whitelist words show up in a sample, that would suggest it was generated by the AI.

This simplistic approach would be too restrictive since it’s hard to predict which words might be necessary for a discussion when working one word at a time, as most LLMs do. Goldstein suggests that ChatGPT could be given the ability to look ahead further than one word so it can plan a sentence that can be filled with whitelisted words while still making sense.

ChatGPT made a big splash when it entered the community writing pool and can be a great teaching aide as well. It’s important to introduce artificial intelligence in schools since it will clearly be an important technology to understand in the future, but it will continue to be controversial until the issue of plagiarism is addressed.

Editors' Recommendations

Alan Truly
Computing Writer
Alan is a Computing Writer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. A tech-enthusiast since his youth, Alan stays current on what is…
Google Bard could soon become your new AI life coach
Google Bard on a green and black background.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT have gotten a bad rep recently, but Google is apparently trying to serve up something more positive with its next project: an AI that can offer helpful life advice to people going through tough times.

If a fresh report from The New York Times is to be believed, Google has been testing its AI tech with at least 21 different assignments, including “life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips.” The work spans both professional and personal scenarios that users might encounter.

Read more
ChatGPT may soon moderate illegal content on sites like Facebook
A laptop screen shows the home page for ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot.

GPT-4 -- the large language model (LLM) that powers ChatGPT Plus -- may soon take on a new role as an online moderator, policing forums and social networks for nefarious content that shouldn’t see the light of day. That’s according to a new blog post from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which says this could offer “a more positive vision of the future of digital platforms.”

By enlisting artificial intelligence (AI) instead of human moderators, OpenAI says GPT-4 can enact “much faster iteration on policy changes, reducing the cycle from months to hours.” As well as that, “GPT-4 is also able to interpret rules and nuances in long content policy documentation and adapt instantly to policy updates, resulting in more consistent labeling,” OpenAI claims.

Read more
GPT-4.5 news: Everything we know so far about the next-generation language model
ChatGPT app running on an iPhone.

OpenAI's GPT-4 language model is considered by most to be the most advanced language model used to power modern artificial intelligences (AI). It's used in the ChatGPT chatbot to great effect, and other AIs in similar ways. But that's not the end of its development. As with GPT-3.5, a GPT-4.5 language model may well launch before we see a true next-generation GPT-5.

Here's everything we know about GPT-4.5 so far.

Read more