Many of us are concerned about the impact of ChatGPT and other AI tools on academic integrity.
How are we going to combat ChatGPT and other AI tools in our classrooms?
The major concern is that more and more students use ChatGPT to complete writing assignments.
Detecting AI writing with enough evidence to act will be a major challenge. As AI tools evolve, so do detection tools, but the detecting tools face higher expectations than those that create AI text, making it doubtful they’ll ever catch up.
Concerns about students shortcutting assignments using AI are very valid, and require creative restructuring of assignments.
While there’s no silver bullet to solve the problems AI-generated text pose, there are tools available to combat ChatGPT use in the classroom.
Let’s look at a few.
Tools to Detect AI Use in Writing Assignments
Here’s a video demonstrating how 3 popular AI detection tools work, and strategies that motivated students can use to defeat them.
GPTZero detects two different factors in AI-generated text:
Perplexity, which measures how likely each word is suggested by AI; a human would be more random.
Burstiness, which compares sentence length and complexity variation and measures the spikes in the perplexity of each sentence. AI-generated text will have a similar degree of perplexity from sentence to sentence, but a human is likely to write with spikes.
Upload text or multiple files at once, and the tool provides a holistic score for how much of the writing is written by AI and also highlights each sentence written by AI, as illustrated below.
Another detection tool is AI Text Classifier, developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.You must enter at least 1,000 characters for this tool to analyze.
This tool provides a simple suggestion that it considers the text is definitely, possibly, very unlikely, or extremely unlikely AI-generated, but no more depth than that.
Writer AI Content Detector is another AI-generated content detection tool you can use. Paste up to 1,500 characters, and it provides a percentage confidence that the text is human-generated.
As you can see from the video above, these detection tools don’t work very well. A better approach to combat AI in the classroom is reimagining how to structure assignments.
Better Strategies to Avoid AI Plagiarism
The best way to prevent students from relying on AI to produce their assignments requires elements that only humans can fulfill. Here are a few strategies to incorporate those elements:
Have students submit multiple drafts of assignments, with explanations of any changes. This way, you can examine their progress so they can’t simply copy and paste the final assignment
Create plagiarism-resistant assignments by focusing on process rather than product. Scaffold the learning by asking students to explain their thinking through in-class discussion, and then ask them to capture their reasoning in their written reflections.
Grade more in-class assignments, such as short presentations.
Make assignments personal. You can require students to apply the topic to their experience, or have them justify their opinion/outcome by citing personal experiences that informed them.
Using AI for Good in the Classroom
Of course, AI isn’t all bad. In fact, when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, it can be incredibly powerful. In our next post, we’ll show you the benefits of AI including how to:
Teach your students about AI and
Show them how it can help them quickly come up with new business models and experiments to test those business models
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