AI Tools That Make Cheating…Err… Research Easier

June 22, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.

Homework has been the bane of students since the inception of school. Students have dreamt about ways to make homework easier, either with the intervention of divine beings or a homework-finishing robot. While the gods of various religions have never concerned themselves with homework, ingenious minds have tackled the robot idea with artificial intelligence. While AI cannot succinctly write a decent essay, Euro News shares the next generation of tools that will make homework easier: “The Best AI Tools To Power Your Academic Research.”

This young lady is not cheating. She is using her mobile phone to look up facts using Bard and ChatGPT. With the information in hand, she will interact with each system to obtain the required 500 words for her US history essay about ethics and Spiro Agnew. She is not cheating. She is researching. The image emerged from the highly original MidJourney system, which never cheats it users. But what does it do with those inputs?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, a generative AI that creates and writes text, has thrown academic for a loop. ChatGPT is the first AI that can “write” a cohesive essay and can answer simple questions better than a search engine. Academics are worried it ruin the integrity of education, but others believe ChatGPT and other AI tools will democratize information.

Postdoctoral researcher Mushtaq Bilal, based at the University of Southern Denmark, believes ChatGPT is a wonderful invention. He explains that ChatGPT cannot produce a full journal article that contains truthful information, peer-reviewed, and well-cited. With incremental prompting, Bilal says the AI tool can generate ideas that resemble a conversation with an ivy league professor. Bilal proposes to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool. For example, he used it to create an article outline and he fact checked the information.

Bilal recommends scholars use other AI tools, such as Consensus. Consensus is an AI-driven search engine that answers questions and provides citations. Elicit.org is similar, except it is an AI research assistant and its database s based purely on research. Scite.ai provides fact based citations based on search queries. Research Rabbit fast tracks research similar to how Spotify recommends music. It learns researchers interests and recommends new information based on them. ChatPDF allows users to upload papers, then they can ask the AI questions or summarize the information.

Homework has not seen a revolution this huge since the implementation of the Internet.

“ ‘The development of AI will be as fundamental “as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone,’ wrote Bill Gates in the latest post on his personal blog, titled ‘The Age of AI Has Begun’. ‘Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped,’ he wrote. ‘But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn’.

In other words, homework be much easier to complete and these new tools will make learning better. Students will also cleverly discover new ways to manipulate the tools to cheat just as they have been for centuries.

Whitney Grace, June 22, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, News, Online (general)

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.