ChatGPT conundrums: Probing plagiarism and parroting problems in higher education practices

Abstract

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen significant advancements in recent years, thanks in large part to the development of powerful language models such as ChatGPT. ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large-scale neural language model developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating human-like responses to natural language input. With its impressive performance on a range of language tasks, ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most widely used language models in NLP research and application. The preceding paragraph showcases ChatGPT’s capabilities, as it was composed and formatted entirely using artificial intelligence (AI). Clearly, ChatGPT holds tremendous power when it comes to writing-based tasks. As noted in a recent C&RL News article by Christopher Cox and Elias Tzoc, ChatGPT, and similar large language model technologies, have the potential to be disruptive technologies, significantly affecting not just academic libraries but higher education as a whole. In this article, we aim to explore some of these potential issues and propose a few possibilities for how we, as information professionals, may be able to help address them as they emerge.