If you’re thinking of solving college homework with ChatGBT… think twice, because a French company is now developing a tool to help universities detect plagiarism.
A French company that specializes in detecting plagiarism provides a tool that will deter students around the world from drafting their homework with the AI-powered ChatGBT chatbot.
The amazing success of this program, which was launched by the American startup OpenAI in November, caused an uproar in universities that fear that their students will fall into the strong temptation to use it to write unsupervised assignments, especially thanks to the features of this free, fast and owner-friendly software. Great language skills.
Many universities around the world have banned the use of GPT Chat, and resistance against this technology is gradually building up.
A small company based near Annecy in the French Alps seized this opportunity, changing its priorities and starting to develop software that could quickly detect any use of artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2003, this company has been providing teachers with anti-plagiarism software for years to detect copied passages. This software is sold in several languages in about forty countries, and it is present, according to the company, in 98% of French universities.
Accuracy over 90%
Compilácio’s founder and president, Frédéric Agnès, says that when ChatGBT appeared a few months ago, “teachers turned to us because it is a new form of cheating and falls within the context of plagiarism.”
“Today, any student, anywhere in the world, can complete a twenty-page assignment in five minutes,” he added.
And Anez stresses that “Compilacio” has a technology that allows “detection in several languages and with an accuracy of more than 90%, in distinguishing between what is human production and what was achieved by artificial intelligence.”
An employee of the site conducted an experiment with the help of news from Agence France-Presse, as a result of which the program succeeded in detecting the presence of human-made text “with a reliability rate of 99%.”
A large portion of the group’s 30 employees, many of whom hold PhDs in informatics, are working on the program, which is still in the development stages.
“Within a couple of months, we might think about launching the first version” of the software, says Laure Chaba, the company’s chief product officer. “We feel that there is fear among customers. Providing them with a solution means preventing them from looking for a solution elsewhere.”
“Don’t think like that”
ChatGBT is designed to produce the most likely text in a given context, much like the “complete sentence” exercises on search engines, but with stronger performance.
This chatbot “does it magically well, in our opinion,” notes Anies.
OpenAI released its AI detection tool for free in February, but has acknowledged that it is not fully reliable at this point.
How do you distinguish then? Agnès replies, “Man does not think in this way, he has faults.”
Thus, the detection system, which also relies on artificial intelligence, will “measure the predictability of the text, its language level, the width of the semantic field, and indicators that we humans will not be able to measure, but which produce a signal,” according to Anis.
But more than just playing a “technological game of cat and mouse”, Compilácio is committed to supporting and promoting a culture of “integrity in institutions, rather than reprimanding students”, according to Anís.
Use “unconstructive”
Anti-plagiarism programs have proven successful, according to Alain Guy, a teacher at the ISARA engineering school, who is also coordinator of the plagiarism technical group at the University of Lyon in southeastern France.
He stresses that the mere existence of this software caused a “massive drop in copy-and-paste operations within two to three years” among students.
“With ChatGPT, we don’t yet know exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’ll maintain the same logic: train first and then detect and suppress, if necessary,” Guy says.
Touma Capron, a sophomore at Issara College, uses ChatGBT on a “daily” basis. He acknowledges that this program “allows for good, accurate and concise research on concepts related to the curriculum (…) but it is not very constructive to use it for full homework”.
