Is ChatGPT 3 safe for students?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether students can safely use ChatGPT3 for coding assignments without risking plagiarism detection, finding that in most cases, its generated code is easily detectable as similar to existing sources.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence that ChatGPT3-generated code is often detectable as plagiarized, highlighting safety concerns for students using it for assignments.

Findings

38% of ChatGPT3 code is partially copied according to Codequiry

96% of cases show code similar to Google search results

ChatGPT3 is generally unsafe for students to use for assignments

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.