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A comment on Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay. Parent comment

Re:Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay by withinboredom on Saturday May 21, 2022 @02:07AM (#31455654)
You can argue that it is no different than spell check and grammar check. It takes your inaccurately written text and turns it into accurate text. It doesn’t generate anything from thin air, so no. It isn’t “algorithmic output” unless we want to consider other tools as “algorithmic output” as well.
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Re:Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay by dredmorbius on Saturday May 21, 2022 @09:34AM (#31457744)
Spellcheck works (and often fails) at the level of individual words. Grammar checkers involve more extensive sets of relationships, typically at the level of a sentence, but are still limited to parts-of-speech agreement, relationships, tenses, and the like.

GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.

By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.

Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.

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Re:Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay by withinboredom on Sunday May 22, 2022 @04:52AM (#31466175)
> By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.

Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.

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