Paraphrasing GPT

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When I come to think about it, probably the one thing I’m most proud of teaching my sixth grade students, those eleven and twelve year old charges of yesteryear, was how to NOT copy and use the words and ideas of someone else when doing research. For that, as we all know, is known as plagiarism. And whether an academic institution holds one responsible for this infraction or not, it is wrong.

I should know. I was three years older than my sixth grade students at the time (well over forty years ago) when I experienced committing plagiarism. We were told by our English teacher to write a few paragraphs, as I recall, on a topic of our choice. Well, I grabbed the nearest Sports Illustrated I could find, and whether it was a famed sportswriter such as Frank DeFord, Curry Kirkpatrick, or some other, I proceeded to copy, word for word, an article from this esteemed magazine. When my teacher asked me if I had copied an article from SI (he even knew the issue, it seemed), I could only look down, bow my head, and sigh. “Yes sir,” I said. “I did.” The only thing that saved my young behind from getting expelled for violating our sacred honor code system was my new-boy status and innocence. For indeed, I did not know from whence I had sinned.

So when, years later, I found myself as a world history teacher on the other end of this scenario, I had the empathy needed to help my students through this process. Grab a Roget’s Thesaurus and try to put your author’s ideas and words into your own, but whatever you do, do not write down or type word for word what you’ve found. For this time, you have been fully and duly warned.

Which brings us to the matter of one of the most recent phenomenons of our time: AI, or Artificial Intelligence. Or more specifically, GPT (Generative Pre-Training Transformer), which is a kind of AI (OpenAI.com)

“Siri. What time is it?”

“”Alexa, play Taylor Swift.”

There. If you have used one of those types of demands or some other, you’ve used AI.

I will not claim to have even an elementary understanding of how artificial intelligence works. However, I do know what it is like and what it takes to try and find an answer, for research purposes, to a subject of which I have no prior knowledge or understanding.

Now if, as the website OpenAI.com says, this makes things simple for people to find information on an unknown topic, then using AI for this purpose is mere putty in the hands of the most unaware student. It can make a mere middle school art student into a Michelangelo within minutes.

To quote an overview section about ChatGPT on OpenAI.com: “Getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you.” (OpenAI.com)

Now wait just a minute. No! Wait just an hour! You, AI, have just in one fell swoop wiped out quite a few years of hours and hours spent in the library teaching my students how to do research. I thought “a lot of effort” was what it was all about! Were not “multiple searches” and finding “quality sources” the whole point? The name of the game? Pouring through hard-copy texts and academic databases and grinding out page after page of notes was the red badge of courage for young students learning how to conduct research.

I can just hear my former students now upon hearing about the ability to use AI for research: “Wait! What?”

At which I would often reply, “What am I waiting for?”

So here is where just a tad bit of irony comes into play.

Let’s just say my sixth grade world history student does have access to AI and is able to come up with an extremely intelligent and thorough answer to a topic within seconds. One in which he or she had absolutely no prior knowledge whatsoever mere minutes beforehand.

“Mary, your topic is religion in Europe in the Middle Ages.”

“Bill, your topic is on the military tactics used in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.”

Mary and Bill, for all intents and purposes, can now forego what would previously have taken weeks of research and writing and suddenly have two to three weeks of no history homework, and little or no classwork for that matter.

Wait! What?

Now consider this: how did this AI robot (again, not even an elementary understanding) come up with this summarization, which is not only correct and to the point but also incredibly articulate?

Is this AI “creator” a modern-day Sports Illustrated journalist? Or a high school, “wet-behind-the-ears” freshman asked to write a few paragraphs.

Or both?

It’s fine that, as OpenAI.com says: “GPT is an AI that’s adept at understanding and creating human language.” (OpenAI.com) But who’s language is it using? If Mary and Bill copy down word for word what they have found on their topics using GPT, do they need to paraphrase something that is essentially already paraphrased?

Let us take for example a subject which this writer knows little or nothing about: science.

ChatGPT: What is a wind pattern?

Answer: A wind pattern is a term which means air moving around in a usual and known way within the atmosphere of the Earth. These patterns are caused by a number of reasons, among them variations in temperature, the Earth’s turning, and the geography of both sea and land.

ChatGPT: How is an atom split?

Answer: The splitting of an atom occurs through a mode called nuclear fission. This happens when the atom’s central part is split into more than one smaller central parts, which happens along with the release of a huge amount of energy.

ChatGPT: What is photosynthesis?

Answer: Photosynthesis is a method in biology in which green plants, forms of alga, and microorganisms change the energy of light, like the sun, into a chemical form of energy and stores it into sugar.

You the reader can probably tell that these answers are paraphrased, or put into my own words, by using synonyms and other like words and phrases.

The question is: What am I paraphrasing?

I am all for technological advancement in computing, programming, and engineering, particularly where it involves the improvement and evolution of things in life that benefit us in society.

But as for me, when it comes to doing academic research, give me what takes a lot of effort and digging. Those before me and for now as well can find quality sources and the right information all on their own, thank you very much.

And, they will be all the better for it.

Credits

Janner, M. (2024, October 31). What IS GPT? Introducing ChatGPT search. https://openai.com/introducing-chatgpt-search/

Janner, M. (2024, October 31). Designed To Get You A Better Answer. Introducing ChatGPT search. https://openai.com/introducing-chatgpt-search/