Abstract:

The purpose of this presentation/paper is to review the history of plagiarism and plagiarism detection software that is currently being used in academia. The creation of artificial intelligence (AI) programs currently making existing plagiarism detection programs potentially obsolete. Faculty need to be aware of these new programs and how students can use them to paraphrase existing texts written by other authors.

There are now several paraphrasing artificial intelligence programs that students can use to reword or automatically paraphrase a source. The student just has to cut and paste another author’s words into the program and the program will paraphrase and rewrite the material. The problem is plagiarism detection programs such as Turnitin are not designed to detect paraphrasing; therefore, text written by these AI programs will not show up as a text match. One such example is QuillBot (Clayton, 2021). A second AI paraphrasing program that has not provided a significant similarity match on plagiarism detection programs is ChatGPT (Hern, 2023). In December of 2022, ChatGPT was released for public use. This artificial intelligence-based text generator can answer questions independently as well as perform such tasks as being instructed to write a poem about a specific topic. Due to considerably concern from academia, the makers of ChatGPT are trying to incorporate watermarking into the bot’s output so plagiarism is easier to spot. This watermarking is now in the research phase, but students in the meantime are actively using ChatBot to paraphrase and create AI written papers. So far, several hundred words from chatbot programs are needed in order for watermarking to occur.

The term aIgarism was publicly used by American venture capitalist Paul Graham on Twitter on January 31, 2023. AIgarism is using AI-based programs to paraphrase sources to create a student paper that at this point cannot be detected by plagiarism detection programs (Hern, 2023). This paper will discuss in more detail the AI programs for paraphrasing currently available. In addition, it will discuss administrative and practical strategies that can be used to combat aIgarism.

Keywords:

Algarism, artificial intelligence, bots, plagiarism, academic honesty, technology.