Did a student write that essay or a robot? Did a teacher provide that six trait feedback or was it an automated feedback system? Did that student understand that Mandarin dialog or did they translate it on the fly? Is that student talking to a mental health professional or a therapy-bot? If you are worried about plagiarism, things just got a lot more complicated with developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand, process, and generate language.

In June 2020, a new and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) began dazzling technologists in Silicon Valley. Called GPT-3 and created by the research firm OpenAI in San Francisco, California, it was the latest and most powerful in a series of'large language models': AIs that generate fluent streams of text after imbibing billions of words from books, articles and websites. GPT-3 had been trained on around 200 billion words, at an estimated cost of tens of millions of dollars. The developers who were invited to try out GPT-3 were astonished. "I have to say I'm blown away," wrote Arram Sabeti, founder of a technology start-up who is based in Silicon Valley. "It's far more coherent than any AI language system I've ever tried. All you have to do is write a prompt and it'll add text it thinks would plausibly follow. I've gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. I feel like I've seen the future."