Recently everyone was posting about ChatGPT and I too can’t get enough of playing around with it. It is already clear that this is a revolution in the way we work, teach, learn, and search. In the coming year, we are about to see a lot of cases.
For example, Darren Hudson Hick, a professor from Furman University, caught one of his students using ChatGPT to write an essay. The theme was “Write 500 words on Hume and the paradox of horror.”
Horrifying, isn’t it?
Now, this all is happening in the Department of Philosophy, which makes the case even more interesting.
Even philosophical.
So, the professor is reading an essay, it looks good and structured, and there are details about Hume and the paradox of horror. But the specifics, details, citations, and conclusion are making no sense.
In my case, the first indicator that I was dealing with A.I. is that, despite the syntactic coherence of the essay, it made no sense. The essay confidently and thoroughly described Hume’s views on the paradox of horror in a way that were thoroughly wrong. It did say some true things about Hume, and it knew what the paradox of horror was, but it was just bullshitting after that. To someone who didn’t know what Hume would say about the paradox, it was perfectly readable—even compelling. To someone familiar with the material, it raised any number of flags.
As I feel it, it is like listening to the modern rap songs - they kinda look normal on the surface, but you can’t understand a thing when you try to concentrate on the content.
Or maybe I just don’t have a rap gene, which can explain a lot.
Anyway, professor puts an essay into GPT Detector - which, to my shame, I didn’t know of.
But professor did.
And it gave 99.9% confidence of an essay being “Fake”. Meaning written by GPT based system.
Now, I would say, that student used poor promt. Like of course “Write 500 words on Hume and the paradox of horror” would give some wiki-styled stuff. But try something like:
“Tell me what is the paradox of horror and Humes view on it in simple words. Make it in the style of Terry Pratchett. Make it short, don't put any deep details in there. Write an opinion about it. Add a rhetoric question in the end.”
Polish it a bit yourself and I am certain, it would be extremely hard to notice anything.
The student admitted using ChatGPT, so we know about the story and we know that it is true.
I’ve also heard from one of my colleagues, that ChatGPT passed the exam in their department.
Clearly, there should be policies developed to deal with this new reality. There are so many questions to answer, that universities would need grant funding or something to somehow answer them.
Or they can ask ChatGPT.
Link to the original post of the professor.
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