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Now the bots are plagiarizing us!
A professor at Texas A&M University allegedly flunked his entire class after the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT took credit for writing their final papers, according to school sources.
Agriculture professor Jared Mumm sent students an email Monday informing them that he’d put their homework through the application and the AI chatbot incorrectly determined they’d all used it to write the assignment, according to Rolling Stone.
The bot reported it had written every single one of the students’ papers, leading Mumm to give them all an “incomplete” grade in the course, the professor wrote, according to a Reddit thread cited by the outlet.
“I put everyone’s last three assignments through two separate times and if they were both claimed by ChatGPT, you received a 0,” Mumm wrote in an email posted in the thread.
The professor, who is a campus rodeo instructor, then offered the class a make-up assignment to fix the failing grade — pushing the buttons of students, who claimed they hadn’t cheated on the assignment.
But some students who had already walked the stage at graduation were temporarily denied their diplomas, the partner of one student in the class, known as DearKick on Reddit, told the outlet.
DearKick’s said his partner had never heard of ChatGPT and “feels even worse considering it’s something she knows nothing about.”
She immediately “reached out to the dean and CC’d the president of the university,” DearKick said.
ChatGPT doesn’t have an official feature made to detect writings generated by AI — or even its own work — and has in the past claimed credit for original pieces, including passages from the classic novel “Crime and Punishment.”
The flawed bot is known to be “not very accurate” at detecting AI-generated writing while other plagiarism software such as Winston AI and Content at Scale have better online reviews, according to the outlet.
Still, Mumm allegedly flunked “several” whole classes in a similar manner instead of questioning the accuracy of the chatbot, DearKick said.
Some students say they provided the professor proof that they hadn’t used ChatGPT via timestamps on Google Documents — but he initially ignored the evidence, reportedly writing “I don’t grade AI bullshit” in the school’s grading software system.
In an odd twist, one Reddit user on Tuesday put part of Mumm’s doctoral dissertation on pig farming through ChatGPT to see if it had been plagiarized.
“Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT,” it reportedly responded.
Mumm didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment.
