The emergence of chatbots and other writing tools powered by artificial intelligence may pose a far greater threat to the future of essay mills than legislation has proved to be, experts said.
There are early signs that firms which specialise in selling assignments are already having to shift their business models in the face of more students using the likes of ChatGPT to generate answers of a similar or better quality to what they may have been tempted to buy previously.
“I think that contract cheating providers will need to offer something special to differentiate their offer from machine-written text. The type of run-of-the-mill and quickly written essays that exist now just won’t have a market,” said Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London.
“Students might be willing to pay a higher price for something that they know has been written by a human, particularly if AI-detection tools improve. The firms themselves may start offering proof that the assignments they provide are human written.”
