A student who typically gets much lower grades admitted to using ChatGPT to achieve a top score on a college essay, according to BBC News.
The student from Cardiff University in Wales chose to go by the pseudonym “Tom” to protect his identity and told the publication that he conducted an experiment while submitting essays during the school’s January assessment period. He submitted one 2,500-word essay written completely on his own and one with the assistance of the AI chatbot, ChatGPT to see what results he would yield.
Tom is used to receiving an average grade of 2.1, and he got his typical grade on the essay he wrote himself, but he was surprised to see he got the highest score of his college career on the essay he submitted with the help of ChatGPT. He claims the essay was not generated word-for-word, but rather he used the chatbot to gain access to more quality information. He also admitted he planned to use his ChatGPT strategy in the future.
Another Cardiff University student referred to as “John” told BBC News he was glad that he was able to take advantage of ChatGPT in his final year of school before the of use AI for plagiarism purposes could potentially affect the legitimacy of his degree in the future. With that being said, he told the publication he was certain that the use of AI in his work was undetectable.
While ChatGPT is not banned in U.K. schools, Cardiff University has admitted to being aware of the plagiarism claims going on at its campus. Additionally, there was a Freedom of Information assessment done at the university in January that determined there were 14,443 visits to the ChatGPT site on the campus Wi-Fi networks, compared to zero hits in December 2022, according to BBC News.
Some schools in the U.S. quickly pushed to have ChatGPT blocked from being used on campuses after the chatbot became an internet phenomenon when it launched in November 2022. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t several loopholes that students can exploit, such as accessing it through a VPN, accessing it off campus, or accessing it through a smartphone or tablet.
Prior to the ban, students have been caught using ChatGPT to plagiarize essays word-for-word and were punished accordingly. One processor was able to catch a student using simple plagiarism detection software. He noted that as the language model on which ChatGPT is made is updated, plagiarism can become harder to discern.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?