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Cited by 356Academic integrity and plagiarismLaw, AI, and Intellectual PropertyEthics and Social Impacts of AI

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Plagiarism in the age of massive Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT-3)

Open access
Dehouche, N·2021·Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics
DOI 10.3354/esep00195
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Abstract

As if 2020 was not a peculiar enough year, its fifth month saw the relatively quiet publication of a preprint describing the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) system to date—GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3)—created by the Silicon Valley research firm OpenAI. Though the software implementation of GPT-3 is still in its initial beta release phase, and its full capabilities are still unknown as of the time of this writing, it has been shown that this artificial intelligence can comprehend prompts in natural language, on virtually any topic, and generate relevant original text content that is indistinguishable from human writing. Moreover, access to these capabilities, in a limited yet worrisome enough extent, is available to the general public. This paper presents examples of original content generated by the author using GPT-3. These examples illustrate some of the capabilities of GPT-3 in comprehending prompts in natural language and generating convincing content in response. I use these examples to raise specific fundamental questions pertaining to the intellectual property of this content and the potential use of GPT-3 to facilitate plagiarism. The goal is to instigate a sense of urgency, as well as a sense of present tardiness on the part of the academic community in addressing these questions.

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Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Asaro PM (2016) The liability problem for autonomous artificial agents. Proc AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents track. p 190-194. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS16/paper/view/12699
  2. Bostrom N (2016) Superintelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford
  3. Francke E, Alexander B (2019) The potential influence of artificial intelligence on plagiarism a higher education perspective. In: Griffiths P, Kabir MN (eds) Proc European Conference on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. EM Normandie Business School, Oxford, p 131-140
  4. Govindarajulu NS, Bringsjord S (2015) Ethical regulation of robots must be embedded in their operating systems. In: Trappl R (ed) A construction manual for robots’ ethical systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p 85-99
  5. Miyashita K, Russell D (1995) Keiretsu: inside the hidden Japanese conglomerates. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY
  6. 10.24318/cope2018.1.3 · DOI

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Metadata

Authors
Dehouche, N.
Affiliations
Mahidol University (TH)
Corresponding author
Dehouche, N
ORCID
Dehouche, N
Venue
Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics
Publisher
Inter-Research Science Center
Published
2021-03-25
Volume
21
Pages
17-23
ISSN
  • 1611-8014 (ISSN-L)
  • 1863-5415
DOI
10.3354/esep00195
OpenAlex
W3125358881
Cited by
296
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 24 · 2025: 67 · 2024: 87 · 2023: 98 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 8
FWCI
64.07
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics (publishedVersion, public-domain)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Mahidol University International College
  • University of Oxford
  • Mahidol University
  • Région Normandie
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Education › Academic integrity and plagiarism
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Law, AI, and Intellectual Property
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Keywords
plagiarism, GPT-3, generative pre-trained transformer, large language models, intellectual property, academic integrity, AI-generated text

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