Plagiarism and Artificial Intelligence
While generative AI programs are incredibly innovative, they also come with some serious concerns. We'll only cover two here.
- They may cite made up resources. ChatGPT will readily create reading lists and work cited pages for your papers, but it is limited to the data they have been trained on (meaning no library resources) and does not contain up-to-date information. To get around this, ChatGPT will completely make up citations to "support" the text it generates. Here, in our library, we've already encountered multiple instances of faculty and students looking for books and articles that don't exist.
- They may plagiarize resources. So where does ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other AI chatbots get their data? Generative AI programs require text and images to be "scraped" from existing resources and entered into their datasets. In some cases, companies are transparent as to where they get their work. In many cases though, we don't know and evidence shows that scraped resources may come from copyrighted works without the original creator's permission or knowledge. And it's not just major works. Anything freely found online is targeted, including product reviews and public comments and posts. Further, these programs also lack any way for authors or artists to have their works removed from the program. In fact, when you use these programs, they often are scraping your inquiries into their database as well.
You may be wondering why plagiarism is a problem if generative AI is supposed to be reshaping scraped text and images into something new. The problem is that it's easy to purposefully or accidentally prompt these programs into reusing other people's works, including creating art in another person's copyrighted style or pulling large blocks of text from copyrighted sources, such as entire pages of books. This means that the "generative" and "new" works that these AI programs create may actually be someone else's work. In addition, even when AI generative works don't directly plagiarize, they often reuse ideas and steal core concepts from copyrighted works without crediting the original creators. This is still considered plagiarism.
While the use of generative AI tools is not a bad thing, it is the user's responsibility to verify the information is correct and not violating any campus policies.
