Artificial Intelligence Chatbot – ChatGPT and High-Tech Plagiarism Concerns in a Digital Age: Is Detection Possible?

The digital age of the 21st century has brought an ascent of artificial intelligence technology used in various sectors. The growth and influence of artificial intelligence technology and tools on education and academic publishing have become an important topic recently. With the latest developments in artificial intelligence chatbots, detecting high-tech plagiarism and ensuring academic integrity in scholarly writing has become a worry with the educational and scientific publishing community. In this editorial, I briefly engaged one of the most popular artificial intelligence chatbots, ChatGPT, to write a paragraph with the prompt – “Write an original paragraph introducing High-Tech Plagiarism and add in-text citations and a main reference list in APA.” To this end, it generated a text with 235 words and 1,565 characters. Subsequently, I submitted the text to Turnitin and obtained a Similarity Index of 0 % and an artificial intelligence percentage of--%. Additionally, I solicited ChatGPT to authenticate if the paragraph was produced by itself. It confirmed with the feedback, “Yes, the paragraph introducing “High-Tech Plagiarism” and the associated in-text citations and references were generated by ChatGPT.” This conversation and further checks affirm the findings of previous studies that ChatGPT can produce sophisticated textual outputs that can slip undetected by plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin. Implications are discussed in the paper. © 2023, Centre for Behaviour and Wellness Advocacy. All rights reserved.