Postplagiarism: transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology - International Journal for Educational Integrity
This piece offers a vocabulary and concrete examples to help us imagine what integrated human-AI work can look like in higher education. While she invites instructors to move beyond increasingly untenable rules and conventions (e.g. originality, plagiarism, cheating detection), Eaton offers a robust alternative vision of what writing and creation can become in an AI-assisted landscape.
Hybrid human-AI writing will become normal
The first principle of postplagiarism is that hybrid writing co-created by human and artificial intelligence is becoming prevalent and will soon become the norm. Text generated by artificial intelligence tools is not static. It can be edited, revised, reworked, and remixed. The result can be a product that is neither fully written by a human, nor by an AI, but one that is hybrid. Trying to determine where the human ends and where the artificial intelligence begins is pointless.
As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated the probability of accurately detecting whether the text was written by a human or an artificial intelligence diminishes (Elhatat et al. 2023). In August 2023, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT definitively declared that text generated by artificial intelligence applications cannot be detected (OpenAI 2023). This comes on the heels of numerous news stories about students being falsely accused of academic misconduct after teachers had used so-called AI text-generation detection tools on students’ academic work (e.g., Fowler 2023; Jimenez 2023; Verma 2023).
There are strong signals that AI capabilities will soon be integrated into technologies we use every day such as Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. Already some social media platforms offer an option to users to have AI help write their posts. We only need to pay attention to what is happening around us to see that AI capabilities for text- and non-text-based applications will soon be part of every technology we use.