GPT chat and degree thesis: the first suspected cases in Italy
The concern is that more and more students may be using Artificial Intelligence to generate papers , without really engaging. In fact, a first suspicion comes from the University of Florence, where some teachers believe that students have used Chat GPT to write degree theses . In particular, it would be a thesis on legal sciences, which the graduating student, who is not a native speaker, would have written in excellent Italian. But even an economy case, in fact, raises concern: the quality change of the paper was too fast.
GPT chat and degree thesis: the news and the teachers' reactions
La Repubblica Firenze broke the news a few days ago, expressing the fear of the interested professors of the Tuscan university. In practice, several professors have expressed concern regarding the conduct of their students. The danger, in fact, is that the proliferation of such use of Chat GPT could favor a progressive impoverishment of the motivation of the examinees.
However, not all have expressed clear opposition to consulting these tools, which are increasingly common today ( Bard , ErnieBot and so on). And even those who were frightened by them still showed a certain degree of acceptance and openness towards them. In fact , the teachers, with great foresight, have declared that they are in favor of a sort of integration of tools such as Chat GPT.
The aim is therefore to follow the graduating students step by step to avoid illegal behavior, one chapter at a time, reports the newspaper. But all this might not be enough to kick off an effective combination Chat GPT and degree thesis. On the one hand there are always those who denounce the danger of a drift of the human intellect deriving from the adoption of this trend.
On the other hand, as anticipated, there are those who welcome the adoption of artificial intelligence, even in the academic field. Maybe finding a way to use it even during the lesson and use it profitably , avoiding the drift mentioned above. Very often however, on these same pages and in particular in other articles concerning technology in general, we have reiterated the concept. It is not the tool itself, but the use that characterizes its success or failure . In practice, there is always a need for supervision and monitoring if one decides to use these solutions.
A possible solution to the thoughtless use of chatbots
To counter Chat GPT and the degree theses that it could generate without any effort on the part of students, some companies offer ad hoc solutions. Therefore, on the net it is possible to find many tools capable of detecting AI-generated content, some called Chat GPT detector .
In practice, these are software specifically written to determine how false a written text or segments of text, given as input to the detector, are. For example , OpenAI itself released the AI Text Classifier on January 31, 2023. Like the ChatBot, it is also an optimized GPT model that predicts how likely it is that an AI generated any text .
But that of OpenAI is not the only application to have such a function, even large academic institutions have made their contribution. The case is, for example, that of the universities of Princeton and Stanford in America. Both have released and updated two tools in this regard, GPTZeroX and DetectGPT respectively .
Obviously, what some professors of the University of Florence have affirmed as well as the Minister of University and Merit is worth more than any detector. That is, teachers should teach students how to ask the right questions to various GPT Chat and AI software. Rather than letting them just provide them with pre-set answers and should help them consider the effectiveness of the latter . “In short, technology must be governed, not suffered. It cannot replace the role of the teacher in the various school levels” . These are the words of Minister Giuseppe Valditara.
The article Chat GPT and degree thesis: the first suspected cases in Italy was written on: Tech CuE | Close-up Engineering .