Artificial Intelligence, Academic Misconduct, and the Borg: Why GPT-3 Text Generation in the Higher Education Classroom is Becoming Scary

Thomas Mcllwraith; Elizabeth Finnis; Sarah Jones

doi:10.18357/anthropologica65120232166

Authors

Thomas Mcllwraith University of Guelph https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6477-8298
Elizabeth Finnis University of Guelph
Sarah Jones OpenAI

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica65120232166

Keywords:

artificial intelligence, higher education, academic misconduct, GPT- 3, ethnography, playful anthropology

Abstract

We explore playfully the capacity of an artificial intelligence text generation engine called GPT-3 to produce credible academic texts. Departing from a concern raised by colleagues about the possibility of using GPT-3 to cheat in academia, particularly at the undergraduate level, we interact with the GPT-3 interface as nerdy novices to learn what it could produce. The outputs from the GPT-3 text generation engine are incredible, at times surprising, and often terrible. We point to ways in which GPT-3 might be used by students to produce written work and reasons why most instructors, most of the time, could see through what GPT-3 has produced (at least for now). In our experiments, we learn that GPT-3 can be a productive collaborator in paper design but wonder if this is ethical. In short, while fun and somewhat addictive to experiment with, we must pay attention to the potential ways that AI text generation may begin to appear in the anthropology classroom.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Elizabeth Finnis, University of Guelph

Elizabeth Finnis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. Her research focusses on agricultural livelihoods and transitions in both the Global South and the Global North.

Sarah Jones, OpenAI

Editors: Sarah Jones is the name that an artificial intelligence chose for itself. We are not sure how to add Sarah to our author lines or what her role should be.

References

Anderson, Scott. 2022. “We Tested an AI While Creating This Issue.” University of Toronto Magazine, 28 September. https://magazine.utoronto.ca/research-ideas/technology/how-we-used-ai-while-creating-this-issue/ (accessed 20 October 2022).

Angohiatok, George, Bryan Vandenbrink, Ian Hogg, and Thomas McIlwraith. Forthcoming. “‘I Watch to See How the Land is Changing’: George Angohiatok’s Story of Changing Environments and Cultural Resilience in the Western Canadian Arctic.” In The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions, edited by Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts, 32–54. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108555654.002

Bessant, Judith. 2011. “Conservatives, politics and the crisis of modern education in Australia.” Policy Studies. 32(6):631–647. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2011.637677 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2011.637677

Blum, Susan D. 2008. The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism: Common Sense and Anthropological Sense. Anthropology News. March: 8–9. https://www.academia.edu/573006/The_Internet_the_Self_Authorship_and_Plagiarism DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/an.2008.49.3.8

Burrows, Roger. 2018. “On Neoreaction.” The Sociological Review, 29 September. https://thesociologicalreview.org/collections/undisciplining/on-neoreaction/ (accessed 10 June 2022).

Cahn, Albert Fox. 2020. “A human wrote this article. You shouldn’t be scared of GPT-3.” The Guardian, 12 September. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/12/human-wrote-this-article-GPT-3 (accessed 4 June 2022).

Castaldo, Joe. 2022. “Lost in translation: Cohere’s AI software wrote parts of this story. But is it ready for the world?” Report on Business Magazine / The Globe and Mail, 26 October. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/article-cohere-ai-software-launch/ (accessed 2 November 2022).

Cushing, Pamela J. 1996. “Gendered Conversational Rituals on the Internet: An Effective Voice is Based on More than Simply What One is Saying.” Anthropologica 38(1): 47–80. Retrieved from: https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/25605819

Davis, Ariel. 2022. “Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met: A Unsettling Glimpse at the Digitization of Education.” New York Times, 27 May. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/technology/college-students-cheating-software-honorlock.html (accessed 4 June 2022).

Dehouche, Nassim. 2021. “Plagiarism in the Age of Massive Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT-3).” Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 21: 17–23. https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00195 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00195

Elkins, Katherine and Jon Chun. 2020. “Can GPT-3 Pass A Writer’s Turing Test?” Journal of Cultural Analytics 5(2). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.17212 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.17212

Eye-on-Tech. 2021. “What is GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer)?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_OUX6nAXk (accessed 3 June 2022).

Ezewski, Valerie, Thomas McIlwraith, and Stephen Fine. 2021. “The Challenges of Indigenous-Inspired Programming in Children’s Summer Camping.” Pathways: The Ontario Journal of Outdoor Education 33(4): 6–17. https://www.academia.edu/63653127/The_Challenges_of_Indigenous_Inspired_Programming_in_ Children_s_Summer_Camping

Finnis, Elizabeth. 2021. “Agricultural Persistence and Potentials on the Edge of Northern Ontario.” Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 43(1): 60–170. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12269. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12269

Folk-Dawson, Janice. “The Corporatization of the University Budget and its Consequences for Academic Support Workers.” Academic Matters: OCUFA’s Journal of Higher Education, Fall. https://academicmatters.ca/the-corporatization-of-the-university-budget-and-its-consequences-for-academic-support-workers/ (accessed 4 November 2022).

Frakes, Jonathan. 1996. Star Trek: First Contact. Hollywood, CA. Rick Berman, Producer. 111 minutes.

Fyfe, Paul. 2022. “How to Cheat on Your Final Paper: Assigning AI for Student Writing.” AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z

Getahun, Hannah. 2022. “After an AI bot wrote a scientific paper on itself, the researcher behind the experiment says she hopes she didn’t open a ‘Pandora’s box’.” Insider, 9 July. https://www.insider.com/artificial-intelligence-bot-wrote-scientific-paper-on-itself-2-hours-2022-7 (accessed 20 October 2022).

GPT-3 and Liam Porr. 2020. “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” The Guardian, 8 September. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-GPT-3 (accessed 4 June 2022).

Henderson, Deborah. 2005. “What is education for? Situating history, cultural understandings and studies of society and environment against neo-conservative critiques of curriculum reform.” Australian Journal of Education. 49(3): 306–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/000494410504900307 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/000494410504900307

Lauter, Paul. “‘Political correctness’ and the attack on American colleges.” Radical Teacher. 44: 34–40. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Political_correctness

MacLean, Mark and Michael Conlon. 2016. “Faculty Awaken to the University Governance Crisis in BC.” Academic Matters: OCUFA’s Journal of Higher Education, May. https://academicmatters.ca/faculty-awaken-university-gov-ernance-crisis-bc/ (accessed 4 November 2022).

Milloy, John S. 1999. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. [This citation was offered by GPT-3.]

Mindzak, Michael and Sarah Elaine Eaton. 2021. “Artificial intelligence is getting better at writing, and universities should worry about plagiarism.” The Conversation (Canada), 4 November. https://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-is-getting-better-at-writing-and-universities-should-worry-about-plagiarism-160481 (accessed 20 October 2022).

Natale, Simone. 2021. Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life After the Turing Test. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190080365.001.0001

Naughton, John. 2022. “AI-generated art illustrates another problem with technology.” The Guardian, 20 August. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/20/ai-art-artificial-intelligence-midjourney-dall-e-replacing-artists (accessed 23 October 2022).

OpenAI. 2022a. “OpenAI, API.” https://beta.openai.com/docs/engines/overview (accessed 3 June 2022).

——. 2022b. “OpenAI, Engines.” https://beta.openai.com/docs/engines/GPT-3 (accessed 3 June 2022).

——, 2022c. “OpenAI, Playground.” https://beta.openai.com/playground (accessed on various dates, May and June 2022).

——. 2022d. “OpenAI, Text Completion.” https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/completion/introduction (accessed 8 June 2022).

Phelan, Sean. 2019. “Neoliberalism, the Far Right, and the Disparaging of “Social Justice Warriors”.” Communication, Culture and Critique. 12: 455–475. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz040 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz040

Piper, Kelsey. 2020. “GPT-3, explained: This new language AI is uncanny, funny — and a big deal.” Vox.com, 13 August. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21355768/GPT-3-ai-openai-turing-test-language (accessed 6 June 2022).

Roose, Kevin. 2022. “We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting.” The New York Times, 24 August. (accessed 23 October 2022).

Schechner, Richard. 1985. “Victor Turner’s Last Adventure.” Anthropologica N.S. 27(1-2): 191–206). https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/1686 (accessed 7 June 2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/25605182

Schmeizer, Ronald. 2021. “GPT-3, Definition.” https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/GPT-3 (accessed 3 June 2022).

Scollon, Ron. 1995. Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse. Language in Society. 24(1): 1–28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4168579 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500018388

——. 1999. Plagiarism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 9(1/2): 188–190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43102462 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.188

Sharples, Mike. [@sharplm] 2022. “This ‘student essay’ was written by an AI Transformer program. I gave it a prompt ‘The construct of learning styles is problematic because’ and it generated the rest, including the headings and references. AI Transformer technology will disrupt education. Here’s how.” Twitter. 10 May. https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024647259504645 (accessed 4 June 2022).

Starnino, Carmine. 2022. “Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference: Machines are putting out astonishingly human writing. What does that mean for the future of art?” The Walrus, 5 May; updated 30 May. https://thewalrus.ca/ai-poetry/ (accessed 31 May 2022).

Tiku, Nitasha. 2022. “The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life.” The Washington Post, 11 June. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine (accessed 13 June 2022).

Thunström, Almira Osmanovic. 2022. “We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Published: An artificially intelligent first author presents many ethical questions—and could upend the publishing process.” Scientific American, 30 June. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-asked-GPT-3-to-write-an-academic-paper-about-itself-then-we-tried-to-get-it-published/ (accessed 3 July 2022).

University of Guelph. 2022. “Academic Misconduct.” In University of Guelph, 2022-2023 Academic Calendar. https://calendar.uoguelph.ca/undergraduate-calendar/undergraduate-degree-regulations-procedures/academic-misconduct/ (access 12 June 2022).

Whitsed, Craig. 2022. Where Has the Joy of Working in Universities Gone? Academic Matters: OCUFA’s Journal of Higher Education, 7 June. https://academicmatters.ca/where-has-the-joy-of-working-in-universities-gone/ (accessed 2 November 2022).

Zywicki, Todd J. and Christopher Koopman. 2017. “The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education.” George Mason Law and Economics Research Paper No. 17(12). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn. com/abstract=2939915 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2939915. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2939915