Top French university bans students from using ChatGPT
A French university bans ChatGPT after it emerged that the bot had passed exams at a US law school.
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A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023 (AP)
A top French university prohibited students from using ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, to complete homework assignments, in the first such ban at a college in the country.
The bot from OpenAI, an American company that received this week a huge cash injection from Microsoft, responds to simple prompts with reams of text inspired by data collected from the internet.
Anyone using the chatbot would face "sanctions which can go as far as expulsion from the establishment or even from higher learning," the Sciences Po school in Paris, a prestigious university in France, said.
"The use, without explicit mention, of ChatGPT or any other tool using AI at Sciences Po is... for the moment strictly forbidden for students producing written or oral assignments," the university added.
The university gave one exception, the "educational use under the supervision of a teacher", it added in an open letter to students and lecturers, citing concerns about other uses leading to plagiarism.
This decision came after it emerged this week that ChatGPT had passed exams at a US law school after writing essays on topics related to constitutional law, taxation, and torts.
A professor at Minnesota University Law School, Jonathan Choi, gave the bot the same test as students, and it scored a C + overall, just enough to pass.
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However, the professor downplayed the possibility of students cheating by using the bot, saying that two out of three markers had spotted the bot-written paper.
ChatGPT still makes factual errors, but education facilities in more countries have rushed to forbid the AI tool.
In New York and other jurisdictions, officials have prohibited its use in schools.
A number of Australian universities have said they would alter exam formats to banish AI tools and consider them as cheating.
Many universities already use software that detects plagiarism, and at least one programmer is working on an app to detect when a text has been written by ChatGPT.
