How Does a Tool That Detects Cheating With ChatGPT Grapple With ‘False Positives’?
Daniel Mollenkamp
July 11, 2023
William Quarterman, a student at the University of California at Davis, was accused of cheating. His professor said he’d used ChatGPT to take a history exam, the charge buttressed by GPTZero, one of the many new tools that have emerged to try to detect student use of generative AI systems.
Quarterman swore his innocence, though, and he was later let off the hook after he presented the log of changes he made in a Google Doc.
The case raises a point of contention over the use of algorithmic writing detectors — tests of the software have found a high percentage of “false positives” — and there are now examples of cases when accusations that students used AI turned out to be unsubstantiated or were later dropped.
