‘High-tech plagiarism’: Noam Chomsky criticizes ChatGPT and its role in education

OpenAI's ChatGPT has been the talk of the town since the day it went live and has been making headlines consistently after that. 

The AI-based chatbot has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces of recent times. From threatening to taking over technical as well as creative jobs with its prowess, ChatGPT has also become useful for students for research. However, the latter may be more damaging than it is being seen right now. Noam Chomsky, American philosopher, and cognitive scientist describes the chatbot as 'high-tech plagiarism”

In a conversation with EduKitchen, a YouTube channel, Chomsky highlighted that there are already some programs that help professors to detect plagiarized essays but now it’s going to be more difficult because it’s easier to plagiarize using ChatGPT.

Chomsky said that plagiarism is pretty much the only contribution that a chatbot like ChatGPT can have to the field of education. He does admit that ChatGPT-style systems “may have some value for something,” but “it’s not obvious what.”

He said, "The college essay died years ago. It’s a mug’s game in which a student sends me an electronic file that, when open, spills out a jumble of words that the sender propounds to be a finished paper" — to which, presumably, the output of a machine-learning system would actually be far preferable."

"Most technological “disruptions" leave both positive and negative effects in their wake. If the college essay is indeed unsalvageable, perhaps ChatGPT will finally bring about its replacement with something more interesting," Chomsky added.

He explained that several students have been employing high technology to avoid learning and it is a sign that the educational system is failing. “If the education system has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,"

In the wake of rising cases of plagiarism and reliance on ChatGPT by students for their assignments, Sciences Po, one of France's top universities, has banned the use of the OpenAI-founded chatbot. Along with France, some public schools in New York City and Seattle have also implemented the ban while some US-based universities are shifting focus from homework assessments to hand-written essays and oral exams. However, the latter still cannot mitigate the problem of plagiarism.