Plagiarism, a traditional concern in academic and creative circles, has taken on new dimensions in the era of generative AI. Generative AI creates content by learning from existing examples instead of directly copying them. Conventional plagiarism detection tools are designed to identify exact or paraphrased matches, making them poorly equipped to handle AI-generated content. A fresh approach and innovative new tools are therefore needed to detect and address plagiarism within this evolving landscape.
While generative AI services like ChatGPT can generate impressive-looking content and often "get it right", they do not display or verify their sources. The training dataset may also be biased, leading into biased outputs. Furthermore, generative AI models can make up content when they don't know something (also known as "hallucination"). Therefore, such services are not fully reliable sources of information and it's more critical than ever to verify the presented facts from reliable and authentic sources.
All interactions with AI models like ChatGPT occur on external servers. The input provided to the model could also be used to train it further. Open source large language models can be a more secure alternative to ChatGPT, allowing users to retain greater control over their data. However, they often have high hardware requirements and cannot be run on normal consumer hardware.
As the field of generative AI continues to develop in a rapid pace, many tools and services are still in their early stages. Issues with capacity and bugs are common. There's also a lack of documentation and common standards in the field of generative AI.
The rise of generative AI gives rise to numerous ethical and legal issues. Although OpenAI has implemented safety measures in their own products, completely unrestricted generative models are already freely available online. This may lead to an influx of AI-generated disinformation, spam, phishing, hate speech, deepfakes, voice cloning, identity theft and other criminal or otherwise questionable content and activities.
The possibility of copyright infringements is also substantial, as AI-generated content blurs the distinction between originality and replication. Major image generation services such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have already been sued by several artists for copyright infringement.