hey my name is Brian Doak I am an academic author of six books and like 50 articles I have a PhD in near Eastern languages and civilizations I'm a professor and a university administrator and I love technology I love chat gbt I'm so excited about these new developments in Ai and so naturally the question comes up for me as a teacher of students and even as a researcher myself how do I ethically use AI Tools in a way that I'm not cheating and I'm not pretending I'm doing something that I'm not doing let's explore first
a qualification if you are a college student in a class the number one guide that you have for what you can and cannot do with something like chat GPT or Bard or any of these other AI language models I'll just refer to these as the AI language the AI your number one guide for what you can and cannot do is your professor your instructor typically every class has a syllabus that lists policies and guidelines you always follow that not just random things you saw in a video but if you're looking for guidance and if you
don't have anything like that or maybe even if you are a professor out there and you're looking for some kind of structure for thinking about teaching and what's okay and what's not okay then this video is meant for you why as academics and why in college papers do we even cite anything at all why do we even bother to say where we got information why are we so uptight about this in the ancient world authors would often just totally plagiarize each other with no consequence they would steal each other's sentences lines poems and really there
was no concrete idea of an author as as a unique creative Soul until much later in human history in fact many people point to the 1800s the Romantic Period as a period where where in in the west at least authors really became authors in the sense that they were creatives who had unique ideas that needed to be treasured for their own particular tortured uniqueness and thus if you borrowed something from someone else you had to be very clear about where you got that our modern academic culture follows in that tradition why I mean in summary
it's because when we want to engage in the world of ideas when I want to do that as a scholar I have to show when I write something a book an article whatever it is I have to show where in the history of ideas my idea fits and in order for my my my contribution say a journal article to be accepted by a journal I need to show not just one person not just the editor of the journal but I need to show my peers other Scholars who are going to read this and who are
going to vet it and check it and either recommend it for publication or not I need to show them that I understand the history of my own discipline and I need to show them that I have something creative and original to contribute otherwise we're just wasting people's time right so to do that the act of citation of footnotes of parenthetical of works works cited and bibliographies is really really crucial because that academic intellectual product is so special and because the act of trying to find out what's true and right and real and accurate is so
difficult I need to document every step of that and I cannot lie to my colleagues and I cannot pretend it needs to be authentic and it needs to be very careful when you then come to college you are engaging with me you're engaging with your professors in that academic task you are becoming scholars in the making you might not think of yourself as a scholar or an academic but that's precisely what you're doing you came to college you chose that and you're going to have to start to abide by these standards and by learning to
think in a scholarly way and like an academic you're going to become more organized and you're going to become sharper in your own thinking and you're going to be able to situate your own ideas within the history of ideas in a way that you're going to find is really powerful and compelling this is why academics do citation the way that we do this is why we care all right finally the payoff let's go through some examples about using AI something like chat GPT or Bard or Claude or any of these any of these new systems
what what in a college context typically would constitute not cheating at all total fair use and normal what would be a gray area where really you need to think about what you're doing you maybe need to cite the AI model you're using say that you're using it maybe talk to your professor and what would just be clear and obvious cheating academic lying or plagiarism taking someone else's words and pretending that they are your own words let's go through some examples of each okay so not cheating um here's an example of what I think a lot
of people would consider not cheating um not cheating involves using very broad level searches to find very broad level information which you will then specify and embody and narrow down in your own work for example let's say you were asked to read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet very popular piece of literature you probably read it in high school and let's say you were asked to write a two-page reflection paper on any major theme that you see there and let's say you read it but you're like a theme I'm not really sure there's love there's death what
are the themes really what are even the options let's say you went to chat GPT which I'll do right now and let's say you asked hey can you give me a list of major themes in Romeo and Juliet the response you get certainly here are some major themes now this list I'm seeing has six main seven major no eight major themes um and you get kind of some keywords and then a colon and then a much longer description a couple of sentences any of these phrases that appear before the colon I'll read some of them
like love fate and destiny conflict and violence Youth and impulsiveness these are all what I would consider to be very broad level things that almost any reader of the play could recognize as themes if you decided to do that and to pick one of those as your theme then you set this aside you set the chat GPT aside you set AI aside and you go and then you use text from the play to demonstrate that that is a totally fine use of AI you're using it kind of like you use a conversation with a friend
to prompt very general level advice right and I think that is the key the generality of it the fact that it's one or two words the fact that it's a big level thing that all um that all pushes it in favor of being able to use it you probably wouldn't have to say I used chat GPT to come up with the theme of love in Romeo and Juliet it's really obvious it's kind of like material maybe you could even think of it like material if you watch a movie trailer it's like really blatant stuff like
that you can tell right away oh it's a mission impossible movie I guess there will be spies and you know car chases and motorcycles off cliffs like everyone kind of knows that that's not specific information you don't need to like cite like I read you know Time Magazine um July 2023 the Mission Impossible movies involve spycraft it's like everyone knows that that's that's what I mean by broad generally shared information and if you use an AI tool to get that kind of information Nation as a prompt I think that's fine I think a lot of
people would would see that as fine you still as you can see on the screen here when they generate these prompts with these with these themes they have more information than just you know conflict and violence Youth and impulsiveness they have sentences you can't take those sentences and just copy and paste them into a paper if you did that you have to put quotation marks around it even if you change a word or two you're still taking information from somewhere else you can't really easily make that your own by just copying it and putting it
in a paper so that's different do you see the difference here between the very Broad and between now very specific wording including whole sentences and phrases you've gone a little bit farther now you've started to enter a gray area or or perhaps even into blatant cheating if you did that without attributing and notice what the key difference is this is the key the key is did you put those quotation marks around it and did you say where you got it and that just that goes not only for chat GPT or AI that would also be
for a book or a journal or an article or anything else where you get information right let me be clear cheating in college on papers can have serious consequences for example a lot of universities have a policy that if you're caught cheating One Time by a professor that will be permanently noted on your file but it's like a warning a lot at a lot of schools the second instance can result in you being suspended from the University that is serious and it does happen I have seen it happen and it is real I also happen
to know because I've seen this sadly happen with students some students who want to apply for med school or something serious like that they find out on the med school application that they are asked if they've ever been caught in a situation of academic dishonesty and oh no if they have now they're faced with the choice of either they have to try to lie to the med school and the med school often will check your application on specific questions so you have to be careful or you have to admit that you have cheated in the
past and now come up with some big explanation for that and you risk not being accepted all of this is what you risk when you do the blatant examples of cheating or when you fail to communicate academically under the standards of your class or your University you can see how as professors I mean we're not we are wild we are wild creatures professors we're so intense about our standards and we're so intense about thinking and about organized thinking and we're so intense about it because we love it and we care about it and it produces
and has produced certain results carefully thought out results that other people can examine and and that people can trust I think that's pretty important in our world today and I think that you know that from watching the news and just seeing all of the noise and all the disinformation that we all face it's it's probably also worth mentioning like whoa if we're gonna get this if we're gonna get this detailed what about using like Microsoft Word you know sometimes they'll underline a word with that red squiggly underline that you spelled it wrong and you use
their spell check that's actually an AI tool is that legitimate can you do that I think that there's been broad agreement among Scholars students colleges that using a spell check tool does not constitute cheating right you may have assumed that but I just want to point that out because actually we're not talking about black and white here we're talking about gray areas that is a computer system doing something for you that you might not have known um which could raise all kinds of questions like well what if I use something like grammarly grammarly is very
popular it's a tool that really explores your grammar on a more phrase by phrase basis or word choice and might make suggestions I think overall most professors have agreed that something like grammarly is okay but there are even newer products like at the time of this filming there's a thing called grammarly go that does even deeper interventions into your writing process and begins now to act like an AI writing tool by even recrafting entire paragraphs and things like that for me okay for me as a professor that is now going over the line that's going
over the line you don't just get to do that and have something recraft entire sentences for you and not say that you're doing that again the line between what I think in this case is cheating and not cheating is just you being open about what you're doing and this is a great case where I think you really should ask your instructor ask your professor what do you think about this you know show them the tool be like is this something that is within the bounds of your academic standards you're not going to find a shared
statement of all standards about this for all colleges and all professors for all time it's going to change so I think now once you get into that you're now into a gray area where I think you just want to ask I think the key here is just to be open about what you're doing and you don't need to feel shame I think professors now now for all but the very worst professors okay professors now know what these AI tools are and many professors are even experimenting with asking students to use them to generate outlines and
drafts and things like that so this shouldn't be forbidden territory and you shouldn't have to feel shame about asking about how you can use it or how you can't you do need to get really clear though about what you're doing and if you're taking and copying things from the internet whether that's AI or anywhere else pasting that into a document and pretending that you wrote that that you should feel shame about that is just flat straight up academic cheating that is lying like you are lying when you do that you are lying to your professor
is your professor somebody you want to be in a lying relationship with or do you want to be in that you know that growing mentorship thinking together type of relationship I think you want the latter right so go for that don't do the lying cheating thing right okay so the gray areas we've already started to get into that here's another gray area that I think this would be worth talking with your professor about I don't know that this is not cheating but I don't know that it is which would be generating outlines through an AI
tool so let's say that I then went back into chat GPT and I said hey can you give me a three-page um an outline for a three-page paper on Romeo and Juliet uh actually accidentally typed in Romeo and Julie that's a totally different play okay Romeo and Juliet particularly on the theme of Youth and impulsiveness so say you like that theme and you were like okay it will generate an outline for you now I'm looking at this outline it's a pretty intense outline it's got details it's got full sentences it's not just phrases and words
I think this is if if you literally followed this outline and used this you'd really want to be careful not to just copy their phrases is in their words this has to be your words and your phrases and your ideas but I think the ideas here are so detailed I think this is something that you'd want to think about citing how would you cite that what would you do just like type in parentheses by the way I use chat gbt for this well maybe I mean that would be a very informal way of citing some
professors will be very intense about using particular Styles like there's a style of citation called Chicago style where you do footnotes so you put the information down below there's there are various Styles which I'll just call parenthetical citation Styles which would have you in the same sentence do a parenthesis with the name of the author or maybe the tool and the page number or the year so maybe for chat gbt a common citation style would be to say if you did um Roman numeral 3.c analyze the tension between their idealized version of love and societal
expectations and restrictions placed upon them say you use those exact words you'd have to put them in quotes and then put in parentheses after that chat GPT and maybe the date on which you did that that would be one simple way of acknowledging that's how you guard yourself though against going from plagiarizing to citing a source and using a source in an appropriate way so is an outline a gray area yeah I think it is I think it depends though how intense the outline is how robust it is this to me looks like a pretty
robust outline I would say you have to kind of be open about the fact that you're using it same thing would apply I think if you asked chat gbt to generate a five page five paragraph or five page paper for you on the theme of Youth and impulsiveness in Romeo and Juliet but you didn't really copy it you didn't copy and paste it you just kind of looked at it and referred to it and kind of wrote some things on your own that were based on it I think you have to say that you're doing
that I think you have to do a citation for that I don't think that you can just pretend that that was just you with your own ideas so you're starting to see like well if you can't do that what can you do it's like well maybe not a lot without having to cite it or say that you're using it you can see these are powerful tools they are awesome we're going to find so many uses for these things that are going to transform our lives and hopefully hopefully make us give us more Leisure Time help
us be more productive in the right ways and you know guarantee Universal basic income for everyone while machines do all our work and we become um like just happy people living in a Utopia maybe that won't be the future but I think we are going to find some amazing uses for this stuff right but you cheating on College papers is not one of those uses Okay so get clear about this right do a gut check with yourself you know is this the kind of student you want to be can you use it yes do you
need to say what you're doing and be open about what you're doing I think also yes that's the key we've talked about what is not cheating using very broad themes and inspiration from single phrases or words we've talked about gray areas outlines drafts longer phrases things like that um what is explicit cheating we've mentioned it already but I'll be explicit again copying entire paragraphs from an AI model and past trying to pass them off as though they are your own independent thoughts so I can go into chat GPT again and say hey use this outline
to write me a five paragraph essay on this topic chat GPT is happy to comply certainly here is the essay right the title Youth and impulsiveness in Romeo and Juliet and then they've got introduction paragraph one two three this is fully written on stuff you cannot cannot merely copy and paste those paragraphs or even sentences into a paper and put your name on the top and say that you wrote that that is the most blatant obvious form of academic dishonesty you can perpetrate as a student okay you cannot do that maybe you say okay maybe
it'd be better off just not even to look at all not even to go in there and do that stuff because it's just so tempting maybe maybe that's the approach that you do need to take maybe um in a controlled situation and you know with a professor's guidance you can use it to do outlining right depends on your class and where you are or maybe you kind of stop at that level of the broader themes you use that for your inspiration now you put it away now you do that work I'm pretty sure though that
in the end what you really want as a student I know you want a diploma I know you want a degree I know sometimes you're in classes that you think I don't want to take this class this class is pointless but here's something I've learned along my academic Journey I didn't always know at the time what I was going to need I didn't always know what muscles of the brain or the soul or the heart the mind the spirit I was really going to have to develop and when you go to college you're putting your
trust in a bigger system you're paying a lot of money for this bigger system right you're putting a lot of trust in it to guide you in a particular way so I'd I'd suggest for you take a chance trust trust that process go through with it you want to know that you've engaged in the academic community in a practice that's been going on for hundreds actually thousands of years that you are learning and becoming creative and that you're doing the things that you came to college to do that's what citation is about that's what writing
is about that's what thinking in college is about
