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The advent of AI writing tools has led to the rampant use of text and article generators by students to get through their assignments and coursework. Teachers are now facing a key challenge in determining the originality of their students’ submissions. With consistent advancement in Large Language Models, AI is now able to better understand and interpret the relationships between words, allowing it to communicate better through text. These developments have since posed a complex ethical problem that threatens academic integrity. Teaching staff and institutions are now looking to come up with a concrete response to the looming influence of AI over writing assignments and research papers alike.
While there exist codes and statutes in some colleges and universities in the United States that explicitly outline the usage of AI text generators to be unethical, others are still evaluating these tools to formulate sound policy on the matter. This, no doubt, indicates that the current situation in academia is one without consensus. Regardless, the threats AI writing tools pose to academic integrity and the necessity for its inclusion into AI ethics are very real. Furthermore, they’re are sure to throw up more concerns with the expansion of their neural networks. As academicians continue to explore and debate the implications of AI text generators, it might just be the right time to revisit academic integrity and how AI poses a major risk.
How AI Threatens Academic Integrity
Academic dishonesty is an important ramification of unhindered AI use by students.
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The expectation of honesty dates back millennia, with humans codifying tenets and statutes that are the marks of people living in a civilized society. In the case of academia, there exist ethics where academic integrity is of primary importance. Academic integrity emphasizes the quintessence of honesty, responsibility, trust, and fairness in a scholastic environment. The expectation of upholding these values extends to everyone involved. This includes teachers, students, and all the members of an academic community. However, the article’s scope encompasses the onus that rests on students in specific, considering the apparent breach in academic integrity when they deploy AI in completing tasks required for their coursework. The primary concern surrounding the use of AI in academic tasks is disingenuity. By breaching the expectations of honesty, students tend to turn in work that only involves minimal effort for important tasks that might determine their progress.
Using AI writing tools also provides students with an unfair advantage over students that put together original text. Access to large databases of knowledge alongside the ability to coherently rephrase text from existing content makes students forgo conducting their own research and constructing a paper built on their understanding. The arrival of AI writing models that make it even more difficult to tell it apart from human writers will only exacerbate an already concerning ethical problem. While students collect text from numerous sources to feed into a tool to rephrase, models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are also capable of generating content based on the information already present in their databases. Despite a certain degree of mechanical writing, AI-generated content does seem to slip through undetected, especially when students make tweaks to the AI-written content. Moreover, AI tools also compromise original works and their authors by rephrasing content. While this cannot be termed plagiarism, it still showcases disingenuity and dishonesty while borrowing from another source. Overall, academic integrity is compromised on numerous levels when writing and other academic tasks are outsourced to AI bots and tools. From the failure to accurately address one’s learning goals, to forgoing the responsibility of performing due diligence and ethically completing tasks entailed in coursework, AI is increasingly threatening academic integrity across institutions. While ethics in AI have been designed to put forth appropriate usage of artificial intelligence for human growth, academic integrity needs to be further promoted as we continue to witness AI’s advancement in language capabilities.
Why AI Writing Tools Can Affect Learning Outcomes
Using unprescribed methods to complete assignments can often lead to setbacks in progress.
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When students undertake a writing assignment for a class presentation or a full-fledged research paper, they’re expected to conduct in-depth research, collate facts, and structure their content before coming up with a final draft. The written material is supposed to be plagiarism-free, and institutions expect students to cite content they borrow from other sources. The process of writing is original, unique, and often involves numerous idiosyncrasies that are specific to each student. Writing coherently and structuring written content is one of the core learning outcomes in both schools and colleges. Using AI writing tools has now endangered the entire process of writing an academic paper by automating most of the process. Writing assignments are not mere evaluations, but also allow students to indulge in deep learning, enabling them to evolve both technique and critical thinking during the assignment. Learning a topic effectively is centered around reading, deciphering, assimilating, and reproducing core concepts. The use of AI in performing these tasks damages the natural progression of students when faced with academic challenges.
The development of important skills via tasks such as formulating a thesis and presentation of supportive data is also compromised when students extensively use AI to come up with content for them. While this is no doubt a problem for individual students, it can quickly become class-wide issues that instructors might have to deal with, given the increasing popularity of AI writing tools and text generators. Furthermore, chatbots such as ChatGPT can hamper creative thinking. The diminution of the creative process in young students is a worrying prospect for academicians. Continued use of these tools will need to be studied closely and in the long term to decipher the ramifications on students’ learning outcomes.
The Outlook
Evaluating the effects of AI on student learning is key to administering better education.
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Given the widespread availability and rapid advancement in language processors, text generators, and chatbots, student use of these technologies is only bound to increase. Though debates rage on surrounding the usage of AI in academics, it is increasingly apparent that AI and progress in language models are here to stay. While leveraging these tools for student benefit is still a work in progress, developers, academicians, and students must all reach a consensus on their usage while preserving academic integrity. Academicians will have to decipher the motivations of students to resort to AI-generated text for their submissions, while students need to weigh the impact of these tools on their academic growth and evaluate their learning goals. The development of AI text detectors is also on the rise, allowing teachers and institutions to weed out machine-generated content. A multifaceted approach will be needed in the coming years to accurately address the interests of everyone involved while preserving ethics in AI and academia to ensure tangible scholastic progress for students.