Artificial intelligence (AI) companies are actively targeting students to help them cheat in their university essays by masking the use of apps like ChatGPT, in a move that UK academics claim renders their plagiarism detectors futile.
The firms are using TikTok and YouTube to promote technology that means British universities are going into the new academic year facing a wave of AI plagiarism that they appear to be powerless to stop or even identify.
One academic at a leading UK university has admitted they are in an “arms race that we can’t win”, and another academic expert told i they thought the majority of students would soon be using AI for coursework assignments.
Universities’ problem is that new technology will prevent them from knowing when students have used AI, and they do not seem to know how to counter it.
i approached all 24 of the elite British universities that make up the Russell Group to ask how they would crack down on “double cheating” by students in the absence of an effective AI detector. None of them provided an explanation.
Technology firms that help people “double cheat”, by covering up the use of AI to write assignments with masking tools, are now recruiting influencers on social media sites to push their products to university students.
CopyGenius, an online tool that “rephrases” bits of text into more human-sounding language, has posted a series of videos on TikTok boasting that it can help students evade AI detectors used by universities.
“If you use ChatGPT for essays, stop right now until you’ve watched this,” says one video, which has been viewed more than a million times.
