"Tech experts are starting to doubt that ChatGPT and A.I. 'hallucinations' will ever go away..."

[zipplewrath]

2. Had an interesting discussion with a CC history prof.

He was struggling with what to do about AI and research papers.
His thoughts reminded me of when I was in school and cheap full function calculators were becoming cheaply available. There were discussions in both high school and college about their use on tests. Ultimately, teachers decided that using a calculator on a physics test was no big deal. The test was on physics, not mathematics.

I pointed out in my day, prior to google, I had to use a "reader's guide" to do the research for my papers. Was the class about how to use the readers guide or how to write research papers? Should students not be allowed to use google?

Right now my text editor is correcting or suggesting spelling corrections and grammar improvements. Is that wrong?

So a person uses AI to write out a paper on the impact of the emancipation proclamation. His real job, just like when I was using reader's guide, is to evaluate the information he is presenting to support his larger thesis. Are the references reputable? Heck, do they even exist? Were the quotes taken out of context? How close to "original source" are the references?

I suggested his job may get even easier since his primary job in grading papers would be to skim through the references, and check out several of them. If they are all just various authors parroting what they heard on a single Hannity show, he doesn't even have to read the paper.

It's a comparable problem to plagiarism. An older brother was a TA in various literature courses while in graduate school. After a few semesters, he starts to recognize many of the common references, and even specific quotes and paragraphs. The real problem is that students tend to find common and widely used papers, books, or studies and subconsciously end up using them as an "outline" for their own papers. But that can lead to writing very common insights and conclusions as their own. The question really was whether that meant the work was plagiarized. The professor ultimately started warning students about the problem. He suggested they double check their work against some of their own, most often used, references.

I'd do the same today with AI. You want it to write you and outline, fine. You better check those references, and not just to ensure that they exist, but they say what is written and are well sourced as well.