Dutch Students using ChatGPT to finish homework; Teachers aren't noticing

School students in the Netherlands are using the advanced AI text generator ChatGPT to do all kinds of homework assignments without their teachers noticing, NOS reports after speaking to students. Over 250 said that they use the artificial intelligence bot for school assignments, and in almost all cases, they did not get caught.

Students use ChatGPT to answer parts of questions, write paragraphs, write entire essays, remove spelling errors from their texts, or even come up with ideas. They often use it for Dutch language assignments.

One student from group 3 in HAVO told NOS he uses the tool all the time. “I use it to quickly do my homework,” he said. “It often says in an assignment: tell it in your own words. Then a teacher really can’t check what my own words are.”

Another student uses ChatGPT to copy friends’ homework. Their homework goes in, and ChatGPT generates an entirely new version with exactly the same content but in different words.

A group four student in VWO told the broadcaster that he outsourced his poetry analysis to ChatGPT. “According to the assignment, I had to give my own opinion. Chat GPT is not very good at that yet. I rewrote that. But the theoretical part was fine. I could copy it just like that.”

Nijmegen lecturer Furkan Sogut is worried. He teaches Dutch, one of the subjects students often reported using ChatGPT for. “I don’t want to assume the bad intentions of students, but I can’t see if they wrote something themselves.” The existing plagiarism detection against ChatGPT, which checks for identical texts in papers by other students or online, is powerless against ChatGPT because the AI bot generates text itself.

According to Sogut, it is essential that students write their own text because that is how teachers judge whether they have a good command of the language. “Not whether ChatGPT has a good command of Dutch.”

Robert Charmulaun, a Dutch teacher and chairman of the Dutch department of trade association Levende Talen, told NOS that some schools are already considering measures. “Students then have to write texts at school, for example.” Or they have to use recent sources - ChatGPT currently only knows sources up to and including 2021, so you can stymie students by requiring sources from 2022. However, that is only effective until the AI bot is updated.