“Everyone’s using it”

I spoke to a colleague I hadn’t seen in a while yesterday. She had news.

Her granddaughter, she said, goes to Vanderbilt and had told her ChatGPT is endemic there. “Everyone’s using it,” the granddaughter said.

My colleague’s take: “You better not be wasting your father’s $100,000.”

The granddaughter said she’s not. She’s writing her own papers.

Good for her, but what’s going on at Vanderbilt? If students there are universally using ChatGPT and getting away with it, what does that tell us about their instructors? Do they not know they’re reading papers written by the AI?

For me, as for a number of people I know, the fact of AI authorship last semester was glaringly apparent. But what about all the people I know who didn’t have AI-written papers turned in last semester?

Maybe they did and didn’t know it?

We’re going to need those watermarks sooner rather than…