Author, author! Author…?

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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.

Takes your breath away…

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News reports two days ago indicated that cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris’s takeover bid for Vectura, a UK manufacturer of lung health products, looks set to go through.  This  is not a matter of academic integrity and I am not sure about the integrity issues pure and simple either – but there are surely ethical considerations to ponder, and ponder I do.

Last month, discussing What’s not there, I wrote about e-smoking manufacturer Juul’s purchase of the May-June edition of the American Journal of Health Behavior (AJHB); the Special Open Access Issue on JUUL comprised eleven research studies and two editorial articles on JUUL, all attempting to provide Continue reading

Nothing but …

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Last week, I received an email message from Chegg, telling me they had recently changed their Terms of Service.  It was very much an in-your-face message, in Helvetica 21.  That is big.

The body of the message reads:

 

 

We have updated our Terms of Use.

The updates are effective as of March 17, 2021. They apply to all accountholders, so we encourage you to read the Terms of Use fully. Some of the updates include changes to the Dispute Resolution section, the Arbitration Agreement, and to the procedures for filing a dispute against Chegg. The Terms of Use can be found here.

If you do not wish to have these Dispute Resolution updates apply to you, you must notify us as described in the Terms of Use within 30 days of their effective date.

 

 

 

 

It is a very carefully worded message. We are urged to “read the Terms of Use fully” and are told that “some of the updates include changes to” three specific areas of the Terms of Use, all three dealing with problems arising from using Chegg services and procedures in case of  dispute.   Note that use of “some of the updates include changes to…” – note that “some.”  The implication is that there may be other updates, other changes, but they are not mentioned in the email.

Nor are they listed on the Terms of Use page. There is no summary of changes made, no indication of what the previous terms were for comparison purposes.  Nor is there any indication of what, outside the dispute procedures, has also changed – just that note in the email suggesting that there have been changes elsewhere in the Terms of Use.  It is for the user to find them, “we encourage you to read the Terms of Use fully.”

There are 47 topics in the Terms of Use, more than 14,000 words on the page – Continue reading

The integrity of integrity

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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

Guest what?

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Now here’s an oddity. My plagiarism news alert alerted me to 10 Interesting Facts about Online Essay Writing Services the other day. What I found interesting, even before I clicked on the link, was that the article was posted on the Royal Dutch Shell plc .com website. What interest did Shell, the multinational/ global oil company, have in online essay writing services?

I just had to find out.

It turns out that Royal Dutch Shell plc .com is a gripe site, someone with a grudge against Royal Dutch Shell. The Shell website is simply www.shell.com, not royaldutchshellplc.com.

The site was founded by and is maintained by John Donovan.  On his disclaimer page, he openly proclaims the nature of his grudge against Shell.

Donovan might have good cause for his grievance; he certainly seems to have grievance, be it justified or not.  His site is full of whistle-blowing articles pinpointing practices which may be of a dubious nature. The origins of his grievance are highlighted on his eponymous site, johndonovan.website (one of several he maintains):

And the puzzle: in among the many many articles accusing Shell of misdemeanours of many kinds is the article,  10 Interesting Facts about Online Essay Writing Services. It seems out of place. What’s more, the “10 interesting facts” article extols the supposed virtues of a good essay writing service. Donovan appears to be very much in favour of them.  The article claims that “trustworthy and effective” services provide Continue reading

Transferable skills

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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

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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

Of honesty and integrity

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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

Not such a bad idea?

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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 to be copied

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I’ve been busy with workshops during these last few months, and I haven’t kept my blog up to date. I have, however, been making notes. The workshops have given me plenty to think about, and now, at last, to write about.  Stand by!

Let’s start with a conference presentation – not one I presented, but one I attended. Two presentations, in fact.

The first presentation was on search tools and information sources, and there were three co-presenters. The first tool shown was WolframAlpha which, amongst other things, provides quick factual information about many subjects. I asked where Wolfram Alpha obtained its information; the presenters did not know, but agreed that one couldn’t really cite Wolfram Alpha as a source, any more than we can cite Google Images as a source. Continue reading

’tis the season of the year…

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It seems that every year, there’s at least one high school principal who at best can’t be bothered to check that s/he is using the latest draft of the graduation speech, and at worst can’t be bothered to write an original speech and thinks nobody will notice if s/he recycles an old speech, even if somebody else’s.

Either way, such attitudes might be thought to show great contempt for the graduating class.  It might be your great day, they seem to say.  I’ve got other things to think about…

This year seems to have set new records.  There have been at least three Continue reading

Bitter-tweet

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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