HIGHLAND HEIGHTS — The introduction of Artificial Intelligence chat generators like ChatGPT brings with it some new concerns about academic integrity. That's why one Northern Kentucky startup is focused on detecting academic work not written by the student that submitted it.
Barry Burkett had a decades-old problem in mind when he created the technology.
"There has been an issue for a long time with essay mills," he said.
Burkett's project also addresses problems that could come up with ChatGPT.
"ChatGPT and GPT itself is a really cool tool," he said. "What it does is it thinks about the human language, thinks about the response it wants, thinks about what it knows and tries to get those things to work."
ChatGPT can write a whole essay, but the information isn't always correct. So whether it's a student paying someone else to write their essay for them, or a student using an artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT, Burkett wanted to create a tool to help educators ensure the students submitting the work is the one who did the work.
"What Auth+ does is it uses artificial intelligence to read a student’s work, to ask them six unique questions about their work and then to let the instructor know if that student did or did not write their paper," Burkett said.
When a student submits their paper through Auth+, six multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions pop up, asking which sentence or word is from the student's paper. If they switch screens to reference their paper, the instructor is notified.
The instructor also gets a report once the student is done, analyzing their answers to the questions and the likelihood that the work they submitted is original.
There are concerns about students simply forgetting how they wrote a sentence or what word they might have used in their work. He said in the first three or so days after writing the paper, students seem to be able to correctly answer the questions.
"We say that this is just an entrance point for discussion," Burkett said.
Northern Kentucky University is one school piloting Auth+ this semester. Burkett said through the pilots, they're figuring out the best way for students and teachers to use Auth+.
