An incident at Texas A&M-Commerce highlights how AI tools, like ChatGPT, are not perfect despite being popular in the educational space. ChatGPT allegedly told the professor, Dr. Jared Mumm, that more than half of his students had used the AI tool to write their papers. After a Reddit user shared the professor’s email, the university decided not to withhold any diplomas from the students.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an AI that is not meant to assess if a paper was written by an AI tool. designed specifically for this purpose, The tool only generates content from a simple prompt and doesn’t have the capability to detect if something was written by an AI tool. This incident serves as a reminder that AI tools have their limitations and it is important to use them judiciously.
Founded in 2015 by renowned figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI is a multidisciplinary research laboratory dedicated to creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company produces AI programs known for their capability to generate original content using natural language. One of their popular AI programs is the ChatGPT, which is a natural language processor used to enable conversations between people and machines.
Dr. Jared Mumm is an Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources professor at Texas A&M-Commerce. He wanted to test is his students had written their papers using the ChatGPT AI program. When his email was shared on Reddit by a user called “DearKick”, the truth came to light and no student had to suffer for the misjudgment.
This incident points to the importance of using AI tools with utmost care. With AI tools coming on the rise in the education sector, it is important to understand their capabilities and limitations so that incidents like the one at Texas A&M don’t repeat in the future.
