A college professor from Okanagan College in British Columbia recently discovered an easy way to detect AI-generated plagiarism after coming across suspicious citations in ChatGPTs content.Terence Day, the physical geography professor spoke to Fox News about his findings and he suggested that professors should take extra care when it comes to the references used in the student’s work.
Day suggested that the best approach is to ask the student to include a link to each citation on the work, which is known as the DOI or Digital Object Identifier. After clicking on the link, it can be easily determined if the reference exists or not. This method was detailed by Day in a peer-reviewed research paper earlier, which he had put together after experimenting with ChatGPT and the phony citations that it had produced.
By entering some of the journal titles of the citations generated by ChatGPT into Google Scholar, Day realized that none of the citations were valid. He noted that the citations were created based on the limited knowledge of conditioning the algorithm to a particular field.
The professor’s method of detection could be far more reliable when it comes to accurately detecting plagiarism as opposed to other existing AI software. He noted that his method does not give one the probability of plagiarism but can confirm it definitively.
ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool developed in 2019 that produces answers to certain geographical questions. ChatGPT takes advantages of natural language processing and machine learning for quality results. It can produce answers not just for geography but also for a wide range of topics.
Terence Day specializes in physical geography and is a professor at Okanagan College. He is known for inventing the ‘Daylight Saving Time’ and was recently honored by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for his works and being a leader in his field.
By detecting fake citations, Terence Day’s method of identifying AI-generated plagiarism through web links is much more reliable than other existing AI technologies. This method is easy to use, requires minimal effort and produces accurate results in a timely manner to help detect students cheating on essays and other works.
