Can artificial intelligence be used to cheat on schoolwork? Marshall University professor answers

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) - ChatGPT is an online predictive language model you can have a dialogue with and use it to answer questions. Some say it’s better than Google, while others worry it’s problematic.

Bill Gardner is a cybersecurity and forensics professor at Marshall University.

He teaches his students about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, like the program ChatGPT.

“It’s a language model. So if you put data into it, it’ll organize that data and spit it back out at you,” Gardner said.

ChatGPT and software like it have raised concern among administrators and parents, worried students may use artificial intelligence to cheat on their schoolwork, like asking it to write a paper for you.

It’s raised so much concern, technology has been created to check if papers have been written by artificial intelligence. Gardner said, though, we may be giving this technology a little too much credit.

“If you ask it a very general question, it’s not very good about answering your question,” he said.

So Gardner put the software to the test to see some of the things it’s capable of.

“I said, write a biography for Bill Gardner at Marshall University and it came back with all of this crazy stuff,” Gardner said. “For example, it said I started at Marshall in 1976 when I would have been in sixth grade. It also says I became the acting president of Marshall University in 2016, which is not true.”

When we asked Chat GPT to write a biography for Lesya Feinstein, it didn’t know who she was until we put WSAZ after her name. The software said Feinstein has been at the station since 2014, which is not true, and that she co-anchors the evening news with Tim Irr.

“If we just keep feeding it information which is truthful about you, it will write something that makes more sense, but it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know,” Gardner said.

That’s why it would be hard to get an entire coherent essay for school. By typing in all of the details you’d need for it to write you a paper, you’re already writing the paper yourself.

Gardner says this technology is here to stay and will only get more advanced. So now’s the time to use it properly, as a tool to edit or catch mistakes.

“It’s good to remember it’s an assistive technology, like a calculator or a dictionary,” Gardner said. “In the end, it’s not something that’s going to replace people actually writing. It is something that’s becoming more apparent. AI will be a part of education; it’s a matter of using it instead of abusing it.”

Gardner has it written into his syllabus that if students want to use this software to help them, they can if they cite it as a source.

He says it teaches students how to properly use it as a helpful tool.

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