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Is ChatGPT 3 Safe for Students?

  • Conference paper
Frontiers in Software Engineering Education (FISEE 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14387))

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Abstract

ChatGPT3 is a chat engine that fulfils the promises of an AI-based chat engine: users can ask a question (prompt) and it answers in a reasonable manner. The coding-related skills of ChatGPT are especially impressive: informal testing shows that it is difficult to find simple questions that ChatGPT3 does not know how to answer properly. Some students are certainly already using it to answer programming assignments.

This article studies whether it is safe for students to use ChatGPT3 to answer coding assignments (“safe” means that they will not be caught for plagiarism if they use it). The main result is that it is generally not safe for students to use ChatGPT3. We evaluated the safety of code generated with ChatGPT3, by performing a search with a Codequiry, a plagiarism detection tool, and searching plagiarized code in Google (only considering the first page of results). In 38% of the cases, Codequiry finds a piece of code that is partially copied by the answer of ChatGPT3. In 96% of the cases, the Google search finds a piece of code very similar to the generated code. Overall, it is not safe for students to use ChatGPT3 in 96% of the cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt.

  2. 2.

    https://www.bigocheatsheet.com.

  3. 3.

    https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/Julia-Kotovich/ChatGPT_Python_code.

  5. 5.

    https://codequiry.com/code-plagiarism.

  6. 6.

    https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.programiz.com/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.freecodecamp.org/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland

    Julia Kotovich & Manuel Oriol

Authors
  1. Julia Kotovich
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  2. Manuel Oriol
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Correspondence to Manuel Oriol .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Alfredo Capozucca

  2. University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Sophie Ebersold

  3. University of Toulouse, Blagnac, France

    Jean-Michel Bruel

  4. Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland

    Bertrand Meyer

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Kotovich, J., Oriol, M. (2023). Is ChatGPT 3 Safe for Students?. In: Capozucca, A., Ebersold, S., Bruel, JM., Meyer, B. (eds) Frontiers in Software Engineering Education. FISEE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14387. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48639-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48639-5_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-48638-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48639-5

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