ChatGPT cheating? US professors grapple with viral AI technology as semester starts

While errors are common and its prose can be rigid, ChatGPT responses are routinely substantial, spitting out anything from cookie recipes to relationship advice to computer coding to how Jane Austen deployed literary techniques in her 19th century novels. — Image by DCStudio on Freepik

Plagiarism in college isn’t new, but the arrival of a popular, free language platform powered by artificial intelligence has academics at Duke, UNC and elsewhere abuzz about its implications.

ChatGPT answers written prompts in seconds with language that is often human-like. It burst onto the scene in early December when it surpassed a million users over its first week. Created by the San Francisco startup OpenAI, it’s one of several large language models that generate responses by culling from a vast trove of information and using machine learning to determine what it writes.