'Full-on robot writing': the artificial intelligence challenge facing universities

"Waiting in front of the lecture hall for my next class to start, and beside me two students are discussing which AI program works best for writing their essays. Is this what I'm marking? The tweet by historian Carla Ionescu late last month captures growing unease about what artificial intelligence portends for traditional university assessment. "Tell me we're not there yet." But AI has been banging on the university's gate for some time now. In 2012, computer theorist Ben Goertzel proposed what he called the "robot university student test", arguing that an AI capable of obtaining a degree in a same ways as a human should be considered conscious. Goertzel's idea – an alternative to the more famous "Turing test" – might have remained a thought experiment were it not for the successes of AIs employing natural language processing (NLP): most famously, GPT-3, the language model created by the OpenAi research laboratory. Two years ago, computer scientist Nassim Dehouche published a piece demonstrating that GPT-3 could produce credible academic writing undetectable by the usual anti-plagiarism software. "[I] found the output," Dehouche told Guardian Australia, "to be indistinguishable from an excellent undergraduate essay, both in terms of soundness and originality.