Vice article on professors spotting ChatGPT essays because they're "garbage" [View all]

[highplainsdem]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzjew/chatgpt-is-so-bad-at-essays-that-professors-can-spot-it-instantly

“The first indicator that I was dealing with AI was that, despite the syntactic coherence of the essay, it made no sense,” wrote assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, Darren Hicks, in a Facebook post after confronting his first ChatGPT-generated essay on ‘Hume and the paradox of horror’.

For another professor who asked to remain unnamed, it was also that the essay was jarringly, clangingly wrong, that first raised their suspicions ChatGPT may have been involved. The essay, which addressed the work of critical theorist Judith Butler, “was just nonsense,” they said. It appeared to have mashed together various sources that “talked about Butler and sexuality and gender and whatever… It was a series of sentences that made their own kind of sense individually, but together made very little sense.”

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There are also the tell-tale stylistic cues. “It tends to produce essays that are filled with bland, common wisdom platitudes,” said Bret Devereaux, visiting history lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who recently encountered his own first ChatGPT-created assignment. “It's sort of the difference between ordering a good meal at a restaurant, and ordering the entire menu in a restaurant, sticking it in a blender, and then having it as soup,” he says. “The latter is just not going to taste very good.”

Then there’s the fairly important point that ChatGPT is a barefaced liar. If its habit for fabrication isn’t apparent in the essay itself, it’s likely to rear its head in the citations. The chatbot has a penchant for conjuring up entirely imagined works by sometimes fictitious authors. It’s also been known to blend the names of less famous scholars with more prolific ones. ChatGPT’s catch-22 is that you can only reliably spot its lies if you’re a subject matter expert yourself, meaning a panicked student turning to the software an hour before deadline is likely to struggle to determine what’s inaccurate.

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As I've posted here before, ChatGPT is a convincing bullshitter with no concern for truth.

I hope students will soon back off using it to cheat.

Darren Hicks, one of the professors quoted in the excerpt, has let his students know that anyone suspected of cheating with ChatGPT will be given an on-the-spot oral exam.