A large amount of digital ink has been spilled by people beginning to wring their hands about the implications of ChatGPT within education. After all, if trained AI models can generate coherent essays (narrator: “they can”), how will anyone ever know if a student paper is original?
I want to raise a larger but possibly more thorny question: what is plagiarism in the 21st century? …
Let me illustrate with the text of the AI-generated sermon above. I decided to take phrases that stood out to me from the text and search for those phrases using Google. The phrase I chose to search for was “atonement is a profound and beautiful truth.” …
As you can see, this exact phrasing in regard to the atonement is contained within a book, indexed by Google Books, called The Kingdom of Cults Handbook.
[A great question. The real issue is what defines creativity. AI models apparently don’t have true creativity and instead are just highly sophisticated engines for derivative output. And that is basically plagiarism, even if it might not be bad enough to become actionable. — Ed]
Join the conversation as a VIP Member