A series of incidents involving use of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT at Texas A&M University-Commerce received national attention this week.
An A&M-Commerce professor told students that when assignments were run through ChatGPT, the program said that ChatGPT wrote the papers. Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources professor Dr. Jared Mumm told students Monday that some of them would be failing the class because ChatGPT indicated their work was not original. Students protested and on Wednesday, the university released a statement that no students would be failing the class and the matter was being resolved. The students are graduating seniors.
The episode was detailed on the social media website Reddit by a user called DearKick. The user posted that Dr. Mumm pushed back against their claims of innocence initially but later reversed his position and apologized. The user also posted that two other students in the class had admitted to using ChatGPT earlier in the semester, which could have contributed to Dr. Mumm’s suspicions.
ChatGPT is designed to create content, but is not specialized to identify texts created by artificial intelligence. Business Insider reports that there are several other programs, including Winston AI and Content at Scale, that are designed to identify AI texts.