TCNJ

32 The College of New Jersey Magazine Professor Taylor gave a series of prompts for a short essay assign- ment to the 163 students across his Introduction to Philosophy and Contemporary Moral Issues class- es. "Some of them were very weak papers," Taylor says. "And when I saw several with the same structure, the same content, it was pretty clear what was going on." H e did what he suspected his students had done: put his prompts into the chatbot. "It came back with papers that were essentially similar to the students' papers, identi- cal in some cases," he says. Was this the start of the plague of plagiarism that educators feared ChatGPT would unleash? Would the school prohibit the use of chatbots? "That would be like banning the in- ternet," says Taylor, who also happens to be the college's chief academic integrity officer. The cluster of copied papers in his own classes did not metastasize else- where on campus. "Other cases using ChatGPT have appeared, but I think that there are far fewer than you might have expected in November," he says, marking the month the chatbot was introduced. "It became clear that this is pretty easy to detect." Those 14 students got zeros for their assignments, but they revealed the chatbot's weak spots. Chatbots are adept at multiple-choice tests, and can plausibly respond to broad prompts. But if professors ask students to reflect on last Tuesday's class discussion or a student's personal experience, AI will be flummoxed. TCNJ has not yet made any insti- tutional changes in response to AI. "We don't need to jump right to our academic integrity policy and add "What should the first paragraph of this article be?" Kuiphoff types. And this is what ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool, answers: "Artificial intelligence is transforming the landscape of higher education, and The College of New Jersey is proactive- ly embracing this technological revo- lution. By adopting a comprehensive and forward-looking approach, TCNJ aims to maximize AI's potential across various disciplines, fostering interdis- ciplinary collaborations, innovation, and enhanced learning experiences." It goes on for another long and unenlightening sentence, in the voice of a confident but unprepared student padding a term paper with buzzwords and platitudes and trying to hit a page count by enlarging the typeface and narrowing the margins. "Everything feels a little bit like eat- ing at Applebee's," says Kuiphoff about the chatbot's work. "It's good, but it's not memorable." C hatGPT was so startling when it appeared last fall because it made the power of AI — its ability to almost instantaneously explore, synthesize, and communicate vast galaxies of information — avail- able to mere civilians in a way it never had been before. And the forecasts about its impact have ranged from the messianic to the apocalyptic: AI will save the world; or maybe it will ruin it. Applebee's prose or not, the chatbot was broadly correct when it answered Kuiphoff: AI certainly is transforming the landscape of higher education. Exactly how, though, it couldn't say — at least not yet. So let's go back to those 14 philo- sophy papers. In the fall semester, James Stacey Taylor / Images: top Facetune, bottom Prequel

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