A group of senior students at Texas A&M University–Commerce had their graduation plans temporarily derailed after a professor misused AI software and falsely accused multiple students of using ChatGPT to complete coursework. Students fought back against the baseless claims, including one student who showed ChatGPT claiming credit for the professor’s own dissertation.
Rolling Stone reports that a professor at Texas A&M University-Commerce used artificial intelligence software incorrectly in an attempt to uncover alleged academic dishonesty, temporarily delaying the graduation of a group of senior students.
On Monday, a group of students received an email from Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, informing them that he had submitted grades for their final three essay assignments of the semester. Mumm announced that everyone would receive an “X” in the class because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT”) to check whether they had used the program to write the papers, and the bot had claimed to have written each and every one of them.
He wrote, “I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” adding that he had tested each paper twice. In order to avoid the failing grade, which could theoretically jeopardize the class’s ability to graduate, he offered them a make-up assignment.
ChatGPT, an OpenAI chatbot, is not set up to recognize content that was produced by AI or even by itself. The bot is known to sometimes make false claims of authorship, asserting it could have written anything from a famous novel to a student essay. Users have even managed to quite easily get ChatGPT to claim that it has written sections of famous novels such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
A number of AI plagiarism detection tools do exist, such as Winston AI and Content at Scale, but ChatGPT is not designed to detect plagiarized content the way those systems are.
The unexpected turn of events shocked and irritated the students. Mumm reportedly rejected their claims of innocence despite them providing evidence to the contrary, such as timestamps on the Google Documents they used for their assignments. In a public online forum, a user identifying as “DearKick,” who claimed to be engaged to one of the affected students, relayed his partner’s experience stating that she had never heard of ChatGPT herself and was confused by the accusation.
The Reddit user stated that his partner “feels even worse considering it’s something she knows nothing about,” and that she immediately “reached out to the dean and CC’d the president of the university,” about the issue.
Another Reddit user, with the username “Delicious_Village112,” exposed the flaw in Mumm’s methodology by running a portion of Mumm’s own doctoral dissertation and his email to students through ChatGPT, where the AI bot claimed to have also written the content. The AI bot stated: “Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT, given the right prompt. The text contains several characteristics that are consistent with AI-generated content.”
In response to the situation, the university issued a statement, which reads: “A&M-Commerce confirms that no students failed the class or were barred from graduating because of this issue… Some students received a temporary grade of ‘X’ — which indicates ‘incomplete’ — to allow the professor and students time to determine whether AI was used to write their assignments and, if so, at what level.”
The statement added: “University officials are investigating the incident and developing policies to address the use or misuse of AI technology in the classroom. They are also working to adopt AI detection tools and other resources to manage the intersection of AI technology and higher education. The use of AI in coursework is a rapidly changing issue that confronts all learning institutions.”
Read more at Rolling Stone here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan