Critically Analyzing AI-Written Text

Overview

Students take one paragraph from a research paper they have written for the course and use it to prompt an AI tool (such as ChatGPT or Bixby) to produce a similar paragraph including citations.

Why Use This?

This assessment asks students to analyze the AI-generated paragraph and determine if the information is correct, is consistent with their style of writing, or has been plagiarized. All of these tasks help students develop their analytical and critical thinking skills when learning to use this new technology.

Screenshot of AI Activity Instructions
Screenshot of AI Activity Instructions

Instructions
Take one paragraph (concept) from your research paper and use an AI text generator (such as ChatGPT, Bixby, or another) to have it write a paragraph for you, including citations (references) for what it provides.
Analyze your AI-generated paragraph and determine the following:
Is the information provided accurate? Explain.
Can you determine if the paragraph is consistent with your style of writing? Things to note would be the words and tone it used as well as anything else distinctive.
Check the text to see if the AI tool has plagiarized anything and if it can be determined that the text was, in fact, generated by AI. Explain both of these (plagiarism and AI detection) in your answer.
If the above items haven’t already occurred, keep following up on the AI-generated paragraph to get the AI to hallucinate—that is, keep prompting the AI until it provides definitively false information. NOTE This more often happens when following up on a person or on the references it provides. Summarize what happened as you did this.

Testimonial