Author, author! Author…?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

My last article, To be verified…, centred on an item in The Times which claimed that the International Baccalaureate (IB) was or would be allowing students to use ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) in essays and other work, as long as the use of such tools was acknowledged and attributed appropriately.

The news turned out to be true; an article by Matt Glanville, Head of Assessment Principles and Practice at the IB, was published on the same day, and may well have been the source of The Times’ reporter’s story.  Titled Artificial intelligence in IB assessment and education: a crisis or an opportunity?, it provides deeper and more thoughtful detail and consideration than the story in The Times, including a rationale for the decision to allow its use and thoughts on how it might change learning and teaching and the purpose of assessment.  For those with access to My IB, Appendix 6 of IB’s newly updated Academic Integrity Policy provides much for educationists to think about, and requires that use of AI be acknowledged and, when used in assessments and coursework must be cited and referenced.

Elsewhere, on Linkedin, IB has published a slide set Guidance for students on referencing AI, with the first slide reading “How IB students can correctly (sic) reference AI tools like ChatGPT”.  (I am not so sure that “correctly” is the right word, mainly because it implies that there is just one “correct” way to reference AI tools regardless of which style guide is being used for the rest of the work.  I am not sure about the helpfulness of the examples used in the slides, but that is very much another matter.)

Not everyone in education agrees, on whether AI can be used or not and on the efficacy of AI-generated text detection software.  The i newspaper reports Oxford and Cambridge ban ChatGPT over plagiarism fears but other universities embrace AI bot, The Guardian declares Australian universities split on using new tool to detect AI plagiarism.

Publishers have different takes on AI as well, raising some interesting and paradoxical considerations:  if we require tools such as ChatGPT to be cited and referenced, does this give them some form of authority?  Authority implies responsibility and, dare I say it, authorship – but can ChatGPT be an author? If it can be regarded as an author, can it then be a co-author if it has significantly contributed to a study and/or its resulting article or paper?   

The first sentence of that previous paragraph may need revision.  Instead of starting “Publishers have different takes on AI as well” it might be more accurate to say “Publishers had different takes on AI as well”.  When ChatGPT first became widely known, some publishers seemed very ready to accept ChatGPT as author or co-author; in January 2023, the journal Nature  carried a News article ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove : At least four articles credit the AI tool as a co-author, as publishers scramble to regulate its use.

One of those articles may well have been published in Nurse Education in Practice,  part of the Elsevier stable, in January 2023: Open artificial intelligence platforms in nursing education: Tools for academic progress or abuse? originally recorded two authors, Siobhan O’Connor and ChatGPT.

Elsevier has had second thoughts. In February 2023 a Corrigendum was made. Without saying what had been corrected, the paper now shows Siobhan O’Connor as sole author.

[As an aside but for further consideration, I am concerned that there is no obvious indication on the original article showing that a correction had been made; clicking on the Show more indicator reveals a message and an invitation to check for updates, an Erratum message and a link to the Corrigendum, but I do wonder why the correction is not more obvious.]

Academic publishers may be clearer now in their views on the inclusion of AI tools as authors. 

As instance, journals in the Science stable (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science – AASL) do not accept AI as author or co-author.  , Holden Thorp, editor of Science, stated in ChatGPT is fun, but not an author that  AASL’s Editorial Policies require authors to have agency and to take responsibility for their contributions;  since artificial intelligence lacks agency and cannot be held responsible for its output, it cannot be cited as an author.

In a position statement on Authorship and AI tools, the UK Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) also advises that AI cannot take responsibility for its output and therefore cannot be named as an author or co-author of a paper; its use must instead be acknowledged in the Methods or other appropriate section of a paper.

The lines “A paradox / A most ingenious paradox!” (as Ruth sings in The Pirates of Penzance) come to mind. Scholarly publishers demand that we do not cite and reference AI tools, the IB (and probably other educational bodies which allow use of AI as well) requires citations and references.

So we come to the question, what do the major referencing style guides say?

Perhaps not surprisingly, the major style guides also give different advice.  APA, for instance, gives advice on how to cite and reference AI when this is required by instructors, while recognising that many instructors either forbid its use or strongly urge caution on those who do use it (How to cite ChatGPT).  I think APA’s original advice was to treat ChatGPT output as a personal communication, cited in the text but not included in the reference list as it is a non-retrievable source – but the advice in this blog article is different; I wonder if I am thinking of advice given in libguides and by other gurus, based on how they thought APA might handle ChatGPT output. 

APA’s current advice, as stated in How to cite ChatGPT,  is to reference it as an algorithm:

Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

The example given is

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

Reference

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

The article also notes that the APA Style team is in discussion with the editors of the journals published by APA and will issue (more) definitive guidance later this year.

APA’s stance contrasts with that of the Chicago Manual of Style, which prefers the notion of a personal communication.  The CMOS page Citation, Documentation of Sources gives examples of both footnote and in-text citations of AI source material, but advises

But don’t cite ChatGPT in a bibliography or reference list. Though OpenAI assigns unique URLs to conversations generated from your prompts, those can’t be used by others to access the same content (they require your login credentials), making a ChatGPT conversation like an email, phone, or text conversation—or any other type of personal communication (see CMOS 14.214 and 15.53).

MLA takes the stance that AI cannot be treated as an author so a user of AI should treat its output as authorless, with the prompt (or a short-form of the prompt) used in the citation in the text and the full prompt included in the list of Works Cited (How do I cite generative AI in MLA style?).

Works-Cited-List Entry

“In 200 words, describe the symbolism of the green light in The
Great Gatsby” follow-up prompt to list sources. ChatGPT, 13
Feb. version, OpenAI, 9 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

APA and MLA (but not Chicago) caution that writers should verify whatever information they are given by an AI tool, whether AI gives a citation or not.  This is good practice – should be standard practice – whether it is AI or an online source or a print source being used. It is especially so while ChatGPT (and possibly other AI tools) is so notoriously given to hallucination, sometimes “making up” the information it gives, sometimes inventing its sources of information – and sometimes giving very accurate information without citing its sources.  “Go to the source – and then cite that” has always been good advice.

Clearly (and despite that IB slide set) there is more than one “correct” way to acknowledge, cite and/or reference use of artificial intelligence tools.  Best advice might be to use any examples in the published style guides as templates for whatever AI is being used and, for IB assessment, to include a bibliographic reference even when the style in use suggests that a reference is unnecessary.

Panic!

And still there is panic in educational circles.  Part of the concern is due to fears of plagiarism – it is all very well requiring students to document their use of AI tools, but what of students who use AI to produce their work in part or full but who do not declare it at all?

Almost an echo of the “how much plagiarism is acceptable?” non-question commonly asked in educational forums, now that Turnitin is flagging AI-produced content, some teachers are now asking “how much AI-produced content is acceptable?” and “how much AI-produced content is acceptable if it is cited and referenced?”!  (These are the gist of two questions raised in a post Clarity on the IB Guidelines on the use of AI Tools on My IB Programme Communities, so accessible only to those who can access My IB, I am afraid).

Leaving aside the issue of how accurate AI-detectors are,and reports of both false positives (material flagged as AI-generated when it is genuinely the work of the writer) and false negatives (material flagged as genuine when it is AI-generated), there is the issue (already mentioned here) that AI tools do not always report from where they obtained the information they output and, when they do, this may not be true or accurate.  This begs the question, if a student uses and cites ChatGPT when the software has plagiarised or invented its information and/or its sources,  is the student plagiarising or otherwise misleading the reader too?  Can the student be accused of plagiarising if they have cited their source, or secondary cited the source which ChatGPT claims to have used?

My own thought is probably not, not if the writer has cited the source, either directly to ChatGPT or with a “ChatGPT cites named source as saying. “bla bla bla …”.  The student is being honest about the source of the information – but that student may well be guilty of a lack of academic integrity by not digging deeper, not checking the veracity and accuracy of what has been garnered from the AI.  And again, this goes for use of any material, be it AI or online or print or broadcast or whatever – the integrity of the research is at risk if we do not check and verify.

There is a lack of honesty – and of integrity too – if there is no attempt to cite AI as the source of information, just as there are these deficiencies if the source is print or digital or online, just as there are deficiencies if writers reuse their own earlier work without stating this, self-plagiarism.  Plagiarism (and self-plagiarism) is two-sided. Not only do writers (or AI tools etc) whose work is used without attribution miss out on the credit which is their due, but those who read the plagiarised material lose out too – they are deceived into thinking that the current writer is responsible for the words, thoughts and information and given more credit than they deserve.

Jonathan Bailey’s blog post One Way AI Has Changed Plagiarism takes this line of thought further. Commenting on the criticism that CNET received when it revealed earlier this year that articles which it had published as written by “CNET Money Staff” were in fact AI-generated content, he suggests

The audience felt lied to, and for good reason. The fact no person was plagiarized from was unimportant, it was the lie (or the omission) that was the issue.

This cuts more to the fundamental issue of what plagiarism is. It is a lie. It is an author saying, either directly or implicitly, that the work is theirs and is original when, in fact, it is not. 

This puts the focus on what the actual act of plagiarism is. It’s not a sneaky attempt to deprive attribution, but an attempt to lie and pass off the work to others. 

With no direct victim, willing or not, the conversation can finally focus on that.

I think Bailey has captured and extended on what I have tried to say in several of my own posts, most recently in Back to basics, again, where I quote Heather Michael saying, in an IB video International-mindedness and the DP Core (also available on Vimeo)

I worry sometimes that people task the extended essay and sort of deliver it as a series of timelines as opposed to teaching students what it means to be a researcher (00.40).

As educators, we really should be concerned with process as well as product, helping students understand what it means to be a researcher – and thus why integrity is so important, is not just a matter of citing and referencing sources.  And of course, many of us are so concerned, including the readers of this blog. 

Being a researcher requires accuracy, transparency, thoughtfulness, honesty, integrity and more.  Being an authentic researcher means going to the source, checking and verifying, weighing and evaluating.  Something which gets us beyond pondering questions of authorship and considering the author themselves.

It sounds like hard work and maybe it is – but research is rewarding, research is fun and the result should be something genuine, helpful, something of which to be proud.

The integrity of integrity

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

One of my neighbours was livid earlier this week. The council recycling collection team had not emptied his recycling box. We leave our recycling boxes at the roadside for collection; everyone else’s recycling had been collected, our boxes emptied, but not his.  A large tag tied to the handle explained why:  the recycling was contaminated.

Someone, presumably a passer-by, had deposited a polystyrene carton and the remains of a take-away meal in the recycling box. The whole box was deemed contaminated and could not be taken for processing.

Contamination of recycling is a problem. If not caught Continue reading

Transferable skills

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

If you were hoping for more thoughts on footnotes and endnotes this week, my apologies. The thoughts I had in mind are still to come.  This post is still about footnotes, but not quite what I thought I’d be saying.

The IB has begun posting the May 2018 DP subject reports in the Programme Resource Centre and I have spent some time this past week looking through them.

This is not something I do as a matter of course. I do look at the Extended Essay reports for all subjects – and eagerly await publication, they must surely be posted any day now. But I don’t follow the subject reports that carefully.

My look at the subject reports was impelled by a comment made in a workshop I led last week – a history teacher insistent that the subject guide for History says that students are required to use footnotes.  I was sure that the subject guide says no such thing; IB allows the use of any documentation system as long as Continue reading

The memory hole gets deeper

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The news that the respected Forbes magazine published an opinion (op-ed) article by Panos Mourdoukoutas, Chair of the Department of Economics at Long Island University, with the title “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money” a few days ago is hardly news any more. It has been shared widely and commented on in the mainstream media and in social media too. It’s old news.

Mourdoukoutas’s argument is studded with dubious and irrelevant claims and arguments such as

 

(“Third places” like Starbucks) provide residents with a comfortable place to read, surf the web, meet their friends and associates, and enjoy a great drink. This is why some people have started using their loyalty card at Starbucks more than they use their library card…

Then there’s the rise of digital technology. Technology has turned physical books into collector’s items, effectively eliminating the need for library borrowing services…

Amazon Books is a chain of bookstores that does what Amazon originally intended to do; replace the local bookstore. It improves on the bookstore model by adding online searches and coffee shops. Amazon Go basically combines a library with a Starbucks…

 

The article concludes Continue reading

It takes time

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

One of the basic tenets of this blog is that we do students a disservice when we give them the impression that the main purpose of citing and referencing is to “avoid plagiarism.”

The way I see it, “avoiding plagiarism” is at best a by-product of citation and referencing. It is a long way from being the main or the only reason for the practice. It makes for angst (“what if I get it wrong?”) and it leads to confusion. Because of the nit-picking demands of getting one’s references absolutely perfect, it can lead to boredom. It leads to taking short-cuts, to avoidance of using other people’s work in support of one’s own ideas and statements, to a loss of the writer’s own voice and ideas.

At the same time, as demonstrated by repeated uses of Jude Carroll’s Where do you draw the line? exercise, there are wide differences between what different teachers class as plagiarism. This serves further to confuse, as when a student who has had work long accepted finds her standard practice is suddenly condemned Continue reading

APA mythtakes

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

We don’t take note of non-coincidences, do we? It’s different when two similar events happen close to each other. Wow! we say, what are the chances of that happening twice in the same day? Coincidences stick in the mind, single events do not stick so readily. (This one stuck so solidly that it pushed me into blogging again.)

A recent EasyBib blog post was one half of such a coincidence. Michele Kirschenbaum’s blog post Video Lesson: In-Text Citations had upset me on two counts. Although published on 29 September 2017, my Google Alert did not pick it up until last week.

Count #1: the video gives the impression that in-text citations and parenthetical citations are one and the same

This impression is confirmed in the text of the blog where we read “We think this video, which provides an introduction to in-text, or parenthetical citations, is a great addition to your classroom resources.”

Me, I don’t think it such a great addition, not least because parenthetical citations are one kind of in-text citation, but not the only kind.

Other kinds are available, not least when the citation starts the sentence Continue reading

Of honesty and integrity

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

One of my favourite classroom and workshop activities is a “Do I need to cite this?” quiz. Those taking the test are presented with a number of situations and asked to choose between “Cite the source/s” and “No need to cite the source/s.” *

I like to do this using Survey Monkey – other polling applications will do just as well. It means that I can home in on any situation in which there is divided opinion, or which many respondents are getting wrong. There is no need to go through each situation one at a time if there are just two or three situations which need to be discussed.

Much of the time, the answers are clear: the situation is academic (a piece of work submitted for assessment) so should demand academic honesty, and most students and other participants get it right.

Some of the situations are less clear and lend themselves to discussion, considerations of common knowledge, learned expertise, copyright, credibility and reputation, honesty (as against academic honesty) and integrity.

One situation, for instance, presents Continue reading

In other words…

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The usually excellent Jonathan Bailey has, I fear, fallen short of excellence in his latest post in the WriteCheck blog.

Granted, he upholds that standard in much of the post – How to paraphrase. It is good advice – but there is, to my mind, one vital notion missing.

He gives a three-step guide to good paraphrase: read and understand what you are reading, put it aside and don’t look at it again, then note or write fully what you remember as most important, the “key points.”

Bailey does not define “key points.” I would make the point that what is key may well depend on your purpose, why you want to make those points, why you think they are important and worth noting.

That is a minor point. The big point I think he has missed is that, Continue reading

Zero credibility

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

BBC News today carries the story of Mariam Malak, The star pupil who scored zero in all her exams.

It seems that Mariam expected to score highly in Egypt’s high-school graduation exams. She had such a good record that she, her family, her school expected her to be among the country’s top-scoring students. She expected, and was expected, to score well enough to make it to medical school.

Instead of which, she managed to score a zero in all seven exams. It is pretty difficult to score a zero in one exam, never mind seven. According to the BBC report, “To get the minimum possible score, a pupil must more or less leave the paper blank.”

First thoughts, evidently, were that she had been discriminated against because she is a Coptic Christian in a Muslim country. Then corruption was suspected; now it seems likely that Mariam’s papers were switched with someone else’s papers, someone who had written out the questions – but nothing else. This seemed especially likely when a handwriting test showed that Continue reading

Nothing to fear

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

A colleague recently told me of a teacher in her school who seems paranoid about students making mistakes in their referencing. He hounds them. Commas, UPPER and lower case, shape of brackets and parentheses, order of elements, everything – everything must be as per style guide, lest they be accused of academic dishonesty. Tortuous exercises, harangues, endless tests, mini-style guides, all coupled with careful, minute checking of every piece of work and submission to Turnitin to boot … for fear of plagiarism.

The students, it seems, are so scared of making mistakes that their writing is sometimes forced, their thinking is blunted. Many of them spend more time on getting the references right than they spend reading and writing. A few, it seems, prefer not to read or to use other people’s work at all – it saves the bother of referencing (and limits their awarenesses in other ways?).

It’s a shame and a disservice. It is wrong. It is wrong, not least because Continue reading

Somewhere, over the spectrum …

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Shades of grey?

It is tempting to think of plagiarism in terms of black-and-white, either a writer has committed plagiarism – or s/he hasn’t.

There are plenty of grey areas, of course, especially when considering paraphrases or summaries, or the grey areas of common knowledge or of self-plagiarism (duplication of work). But by and large, plagiarism is clear-cut: a piece of work which appears to be the work of the present writer but which lack the indicators that show that this is the words, work or ideas of somebody else, that is plagiarism. Probably. Possibly.

Issues such as intent and extent might be of consideration when determining the consequences, but those are other issues, it is plagiarism or it isn’t. Cases in which plagiarism is suspected but cannot be proven will (usually, in education situations) be given the benefit of the doubt: it isn’t plagiarism. It is clear-cut, black-and-white.

Black-and-white. If the signals are not there, signals that indicate that these are someone else’s exact words, or the citation which indicates that these are someone else’s words or ideas, and it can be shown that the words or ideas originated elsewhere, it’s plagiarism.

Black-and-white (and shades of grey).  It is or it isn’t.

I often use Jude Carroll’s “Where do you draw the line?” activity* in workshops (with permission, of course). Carroll gives us six situations, six descriptions of work starting with no attribution or signal or bibliographical reference, and then increasingly more information is included in each scenario. Example 1 is clearly plagiarism, example 6 is clearly good practice, and, as this is a continuum, we can draw a line: that example would be considered as plagiarism, the next example is not plagiarism. Where do we draw the line?

This is a useful activity. I have often found that, even though plagiarism is a matter of black and white, teachers often draw that line in different places. Some draw their line too low, and would accept work which other teachers would rate as plagiarism – and, sometimes, some draw the line too high, and would refuse work which most would rate as acceptable.  Students too. We all know what plagiarism is – except that we don’t all agree. More grey than black-and-white?

Definitions are not always clear either, and the terms used to describe plagiarism or to explain good practice are frequently confused and confusing. Examples are often inconsistent and advice given is frequently wrong. Worst might be those bodies which give examples and state, clearly, categorically and mistakenly, that this is the only way to cite and reference, and that anything else is unacceptable. The SQA muddle which I highlighted recently is a case in point.

The worst of that SQA mess was the guide for Advanced Higher Chemistry which states Continue reading

Not such a bad idea?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

It’s a convoluted story.

First, a memorandum was leaked (shortly before the recent UK general election) which was apparently an account of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon saying, in private conversation, that she would prefer that David Cameron won the election and stayed on as Prime Minister, rather than Ed Miliband, the then leader of the Opposition.

Given that SNP and Miliband’s Labour party have much in common – especially in their joint opposition to Cameron’s Conservative party – and they seemed to be natural allies, and given that there had been much scare-mongering about the stranglehold which the SNP would have if Labour won the election, this was a hugely damaging allegation. It was damaging for the SNP as well as for Miliband’s party.

Sturgeon denied making the comment.

Then it was announced that the leak had been authorised by Alistair Carmichael, a Lib-Dem member of Cameron’s coalition government.

Carmichael denied authorising the leak.

Since the election, which the Conservative party unexpectedly won handsomely, there has been a Cabinet inquiry into the leak of the memorandum. It seems that Carmichael did Continue reading

Not just honesty

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

I am loathe to accuse anyone of plagiarism, especially a fellow-professional, but sometimes it is a close call.

In the case of the two sites I am looking at in this post, it is a very close call. In one case, it’s not a call, it’s a shriek.

I have mentioned my alert before, my Google alert for the phrase “every written assignment they complete” (see Thirty percent).

My alert came up with two hits today. One was a Prezi with the title “Effective Research and Avoiding Plagiarism” and the other is a blog, “How to avoid plagiarism…“.   If my suspicions are correct, Continue reading

Bitter-tweet

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Last night I sat through two webcasts promoted as part of Plagiarism Education Week, promoted and hosted by Turnitin. One of the two webcasts was, I thought, spot-on, encouraging, helpful. The other was … disappointing.

In Tweets from the French Revolution? Using What Students Know to Promote Original Work and Critical Thinking, one of the speakers described a research study he had conducted.  For the first part of the study, 20 adult English learners were given an assignment : write an essay on a historical event or figure. After they had written their essays, the adults were asked two questions: (1) had they found the assignment difficult? and (2) had the assignment helped develop their critical thinking skills?

Most declared they had found the assignment easy, and most said that it had not required critical thinking.  Meanwhile, a check revealed that every single student had plagiarized. Let’s make that Continue reading

A Matter of Definition

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In my last post, I admitted to uncertainty with regard to Jane Goodall’s unattributed use of other people’s words and thoughts: is it fair to call this plagiarism, when the faulty passages were discovered and corrections made before the book was actually published?

The situation is more complicated in that Goodall’s poor note-making and attribution practices were uncovered by a reviewer for a national newspaper, not by Goodall, not by her co-author, not by her publishers. It is the fact of pre-publication that gives me pause. It doesn’t help, though it might, if we were told if the reviewer was reading a galley proof or a pre-publication copy, or if it was the final printed hardback that he was reading. The revelation was made 4 months before the expected publication date, so it may well have been a review/proof copy.

I am inclined to think that would make a difference.  I think of schools in which Continue reading