Global Courant 2023-04-28 11:00:52
A college professor said he found an easy way to catch AI-generated plagiarism after finding fake quotes in some ChatGPT content.
“It’s very easy to identify the fake credentials,” said Terence Day, a physical geography professor at Okanagan College in British Columbia. “All you really have to do is check them out on the internet.”
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Day suggested that professors require students to include a hyperlink for every reference in class work.
“That’s usually done in terms of what’s generally called the DOI, the digital object identifier, and that’s a hyperlink,” he told Fox News. “You click on that. Does it exist? Doesn’t it exist?”
Day described his method of detecting fake AI citations in a peer-reviewed research paper published earlier this month in The Physical Geographer. He developed the approach after experimenting with ChatGPT and found that it provided answers to his geography questions with seemingly legitimate quotes.
But those AI-generated references turned out to be fake, according to the professor.
“The references and quotes associated with my questions…were unknown to me,” he told Fox News. “So I checked them. And what I found was that they were all completely fake.”
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Students are increasingly using ChatGPT to complete school assignments. (Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
“I went to the front pages of the magazines and I went through the volumes and the page numbers, and they weren’t there,” Day continued.
The professor said he entered some of the journal titles cited by ChatGPT into Google Scholar, a search engine for scholarly literature, but they did not appear.
“I was kind of stunned and tried one or two more — and more and more and more,” he told Fox News. “I never found one that was accurate, complete, and existent.”
Day said all the quotes he double-checked were apparently forged. He added that they were “presumably produced by the algorithm as part of a predictive process based on the … limited training it has in a particular area.”
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The professor said he thought his approach could detect plagiarism more reliably than competing AI software.
“There is a growing interest in plagiarism detection software, which is able to detect the written material of an AI chatbot,” he told Fox News. “The problem is that it only gives a probability that the material is plagiarized, and it can’t definitively state whether it was written by a person or if it was written by the ChatGPT.”
Terence Day entered ChatGPT-generated citations into Google Scholar, only to find that they were fabricated. (Felix Zahn/Photothek via Getty Images)
Day said he believed the simplicity of his method reduced the ambiguity about whether a student was cheating.
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“The advantage of the approach I’m promoting here is that the idea is simply checking the credentials,” he told Fox News. “If the references exist, that suggests … that it’s probably real.”
“If the paper doesn’t exist, then I’m sorry. You’ve been caught,” the professor added.
To view the full interview, click here.
