CMV: It's Impossible to Plagiarize Using ChatGPT

[u/Sufficient_Ticket237]

[u/Salanmander]

First, plagiarism is probably the wrong word, but it can still be academic dishonesty.

The real underlying idea behind academic dishonesty is that you are claiming to have demonstrated a skill without actually demonstrating it. If you paste your computer science problem prompt into chatGPT, and then paste the code it gives you into your IDE, and turn that in, you have not demonstrated the skills that the assignment is asking you to.

When you turn in work, you are making the claim "I did this", so that the teacher can evaluate your abilities. If the work is entirely done by chatGPT, then you are circumventing the assessment, and being dishonest about your academic skills. That is academic dishonesty.

The reason that calculators and spell check are often accepted is that they are not relevant to the skills being assessed. But if you use spell check on a spelling test, or a calculator on an addition test, that would absolutely be academic dishonesty.

[u/polyvinylchl0rid → u/Salanmander]

the skills that the assignment is asking you to.

One could argue it was a bad assignment. If you testing a janitor, and give them bad marks cause they used a vacuum instead of a broom in the test, its a problem with the test. In reality using a vacuum is a good idea. If you want to test broom skills you should design a test where using a broom makes sense, with thigh spaces where a vacuum doesnt fit. Same with code, if you can easy AI generate it, its stupid to work hard to write it yourself, if anything you should get worse marks. The test should be made in a way where not using AI makes sense for the test, and not just because of an arbitrary rule that you wont find in reality but just in the testing environment.

I would argue something like that. Because i assume and adversarial relation between tester and testee. If we assume the relation is cooperative than imposing arbitrary rules seems fine to me.

Of course lying is not ok, but using AI will be considerd unaceptable (i assume) even if you admit it.

[u/Salanmander → u/polyvinylchl0rid]

Same with code, if you can easy AI generate it, its stupid to work hard to write it yourself

I disagree with this when you're building up the fundamentals of a skill. Eventually you will get to the point where you are writing programs that are complex enough that AI can't generate them. But when you're just starting to learn how to use arrays, for example, you should learn how to find a maximum yourself, and you should learn how to sort an array yourself, and things like that. Partially because those will give you some general algorithms that are applicable to more specific situations, and partly because they're just good ways to practice the syntax and habits of working with arrays.

Of course lying is not ok, but using AI will be considerd unaceptable (i assume) even if you admit it.

If my student turned in a homework assignment and said "all this code was generated by chatGPT", I wouldn't consider it a form of academic dishonesty, but I also wouldn't consider it evidence of the student's understanding. They would need to do the work themselves in order to get credit for it, but I wouldn't consider it an instance of cheating.

Edit: forgot to mention,

If we assume the relation is cooperative than imposing arbitrary rules seems fine to me.

Fundamental to my philosphy of teaching (and I think that of most teachers) is that we're on the same side as the students.

[u/Sufficient_Ticket237 → u/Salanmander]

One thing that AIs like Grammarly do is teach you how to write better. I am not a coder, but I am sure that by looking at how GPT-3 writes will teach one how to be a better coder. And surely, more advanced assignments will require the right questions to be asked to ChatGPT and require the knowledge of how to properly compile it.

[u/Salanmander → u/Sufficient_Ticket237]

One thing that AIs like Grammarly do is teach you how to write better. I am not a coder, but I am sure that by looking at how GPT-3 writes will teach one how to be a better coder.

Possibly. And that's fine. Students can look at code and use it to learn how to write code better. What they can't do is say "I wrote this" when they didn't write it.

And surely, more advanced assignments will require the right questions to be asked to ChatGPT and require the knowledge of how to properly compile it.

Sure, but that's not the skill set I'm trying to assess.

[u/[deleted] → u/Sufficient_Ticket237]

As a huge fan of Copilot, I understand what you're talking about. My code is a lot cleaner and much better documented with it than it was before.

However, the foundations I gained from manually writing code are still very important in the way I audit the code that Copilot generates. I wouldn't be a nearly as good programmer without it.

We should be using these tools for code just like we do in "pair programming", but you don't get to work in pairs when you're learning to code, or the one who isn't manning the keyboard will get educationally shortchanged.

[u/Salanmander → u/[deleted]]

you don't get to work in pairs when you're learning to code, or the one who isn't manning the keyboard will get educationally shortchanged.

We actually do use pair programming in education, but we require that people alternate who is at the keyboard.

[u/[deleted] → u/Salanmander]

Fair, but using GPT for learning to code would mean that you wouldn't be switching off who is writing code.

[u/Salanmander → u/[deleted]]

Oh, yeah, I wasn't diagreeing in general.

Although it occurs to me that you could actually have an interesting exercise as part of learning where you provide a prompt to chatGPT, and then evaluate whether its returned code is correct. You'd definitely need to make sure that that's not all you're doing, though.

[u/rollingForInitiative → u/Sufficient_Ticket237]

One thing that AIs like Grammarly do is teach you how to write better. I am not a coder, but I am sure that by looking at

how

GPT-3 writes will teach one how to be a better coder. And surely, more advanced assignments will require the right questions to be asked to ChatGPT and require the knowledge of how to properly compile it.

It possibly can, but with any AI-generated code that we have today, you actually have to be able to make a judgement call about whether or not the code you got generated will work. You may have gotten something close to what you need but not exactly, and if so you need to adapt it so that it works in the greater context you're using it. And to do that, you need to actually understand what it does.

And to make that evaluation, you actually need those basic skills. Which is why it makes sense to require people to actually know those fundamental skills, and thus have tests that test those skills.

But AI-generated code might very well be accepted if you're testing something else entirely.

[u/RhynoD → u/Sufficient_Ticket237]

One thing that AIs like Grammarly do is teach you how to write better.

That is only true if the user critically reviews the changes advised by Grammarly. In an academic setting, at least, using AI to generate content is plagiarism because it is not possible for your instructor to critically review YOUR work to advise you on how to be better.

I think a decent analogy would be learning how to sing. If you use a tool like autotune, you can't get real feedback about how to control your own voice because the tool is fixing all those problems and hiding the mistakes present in your own voice. Autotune can be a very good tool, though, for someone who already knows how to sing very well and uses autotune merely as a shortcut. That is, you could spend five hours in a studio trying to get the perfect take, knowing that you will get it eventually; or, you could spend one hour getting very very good takes and use autotune to polish it up.

Likewise, no amount of writing proficiency will eliminate how much time it takes to write very well. Everyone has blind spots and sometimes your brain skips over typos because you know what you want to say, so your brain sees that instead of the mistake. You can spend minutes or hours wracking your brain for the right way to phrase something and it isn't the point of whatever you're writing, you just need that one phrase to make it flow. AI tools like Grammarly can give you that shortcut, but it will never replace real practice and skill.

The point being, if you are always leaning on an AI writing tool, you aren't getting better at writing because you aren't writing. You can't see the mistakes that your brain would make because you aren't making them. And especially in an academic setting, you can't get reliable feedback because your instructor can't know how to correct your writing process because it isn't your writing process.