The academic who posted this is, I am sure, a good-faith actor who thinks that he is sending a valuable signal to would-be AI plagiarists. Unfortunate

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2024-07-06 15:00:10

The academic who posted this is, I am sure, a good-faith actor who thinks that he is sending a valuable signal to would-be AI plagiarists. Unfortunately, he has, inadvertently, done unjustified harm to this student, both in rejecting the extract as AI plagiarism when it most probably is not and in publishing the extract on Twitter with an accusation where the student might conceivably see it and feel humiliated.

This fragment is not obviously written by ChatGPT despite the Tweeter’s assertions. On the contrary, we can, with some confidence, rule out ChatGPT as the author. How? The best clue is that it contains multiple grammatical errors and is clumsy in a way ChatGPT isn’t. Of course, ChatGPT might have assisted in some way, or written some sentences of this passage- it’s almost always impossible to rule this out- but I see no particular evidence of that. It is also possible that some or all of the rest of the statement was written by ChatGPT- but the author’s implicit assertion that this passage is clearly ChatGPT generated is not true. It appears to me to have been written by an ESL author trying their best in a second language.

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