@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
I've come to realize that will never again trust anything from anyone without proof that they know what they have presented.
That's going to be the differentiator in my mind.
Ah, but I think this just exposes something big. Why did you feel that they knew the material before? This is why PhD students defend their thesis... anyone can produce the paper, it's explaining and defending the concepts live that get you a degree, not the paper.
If you were using the written paper as a proxy for testing someone's knowledge on something then yes, I can see why you care about the mechanism rather than the output. But I'd say, again, all that is happening is that what was already true is being exposed.
As someone who made a living for a while in high school writing essays by request, I know how common it is to not have written your own paper. I don't know why people bought essays from me, whether they used them as source material, cited them, used them to summarize research, or turned them in as their own, not my concern. I was hired to write papers on topics. I didn't even know who got them. But I know actual intelligence went into writing papers that were used by people who knew nothing of the material.
When I went to university, the top ranked uni in the US at the time that I went, it was expected, that you had copied answers from previous years. They assumed what other places called cheating as a baseline and tested only above that. If you didn't take the time to obtain and memorize previous years tests you would almost certainly fail. They didn't test only on that, they assumed it as a baseline of available knowledge.
So I see what you are saying, but what I'm saying is that the inability to trust that producing a paper that has good words on it to reflect on the knowledge of the person turning it in was already there. ChatGPT isn't changing the game there, in any way. Authors of works, even if they wrote every word themselves, rarely understand the material deeply. Writing an essay simply is not a good test of that.
So the issue, and the solution, should be pretty clear. Essay writing was not ever a great process for education (or work), we've just exposed it beyond question now. But for many of us, that happened long, long ago. Now you need to focus on discourse, which has always been the case.