5 Ways to Spot ChatGPT Homework Help

Like it or loathe it, artificial intelligence is an easy shortcut to knowledge — in a usually readable manner.

Students are highly tempted to let ChatGPT do all the hard work, and parents and teachers need ways to know if children are using the most popular AI tools rather than doing the hard work themselves.

While learning how to use AI is a skill in itself, offering up ChatGPT homework does no one any favors.

It’s not all bad. Under the right conditions, AI chatbots are ideal learning aids both inside and outside the classroom, a point reinforced by Colin Parkinson, Head of Humanities at a leading private school in Dubai.

Parkinson said:

“AI is a fact of life, and when carefully used, it can enhance the learning experience for students, and it is important to educate students about the capabilities of AI as it can foster inquiry and encourage curiosity.

“But students can become over-reliant on AI and see it as the fountain of all knowledge, rather than a tool with the potential for bias and superficial understanding.”

To that end, we highlight parent-friendly tools and strategies for ensuring your kids don’t cheat themselves out of an education.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. 5 Ways to Spot ChatGPT Homework Help
3. The Bottom Line
4. FAQs
5. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. 5 Ways to Spot ChatGPT Homework Help
3. The Bottom Line
Show Full Guide
4. FAQs
5. References

5 Ways to Spot ChatGPT Homework Help

Even the most astute parents could be fooled by AI’s creative abilities, especially if their children have mastered ChatGPT prompts to help disguise their usage.

Here, try running your child’s homework through AI detecting software. While not completely infallible, they can offer a quick and easy way to check if your child’s homework is AI-generated or genuinely their own.

Free tools such as QuillBot are now commonly used to assess homework submissions by analyzing text for repetitive patterns in language, writing styles, and sentence structures indicative of chatbot usage.

After scanning a piece of homework, it then provides a percentage indicating the likelihood that it was AI-generated or confirms if the document is entirely human-written.

Another potent tool for discerning if your child’s homework is AI-manufactured is using platforms such as Plagiarism Detector and Grammarly.

As you can imagine, teachers can use anti-plagiarism platforms to ensure their pupils haven’t just Googled an answer and inserted the answers word-for-word into their homework — it’s also ideal for detecting AI-driven content.

Because AI and chatbots often generate text by drawing information from pre-existing references, this can result in subtle or, in some cases, direct plagiarism, which is easily identified when reviewing their work.

Furthermore, sites like Plagiarism Detector also link you directly to the original information source to highlight precisely where the words are likely to have been copied from.

Most parents consider parental control software a godsend when it comes to their child’s ability to access the Internet. And it can be another safeguard to ensure homework is not influenced by platforms such as ChatGPT.

Even if you allow your children to use AI chatbots for educational purposes, such as practicing a new foreign language or learning how to code, the parental control software can detect and report the content of any unauthorized AI usage.

For example, you can monitor these reports to help identify recent homework-related inquiries, ensuring AI was used for research only and their answers were not simply harvested.

Considered the most popular AI tool among students for its speed and ease of use, natural language processing (NLP) platforms such as ChatGPT are versatile and can tackle the majority of subjects.

ChatGPT can tackle Geography, History, and complex mathematics, creating the temptation to copy down answers rather than learn anything new.

Still, ChatGPT has telltale signs, as do most chatbots, and it can be fairly easy to tell if something is written by ChatGPT.

As old as the Internet, another practical and often overlooked method of identifying AI usage is regularly inspecting your child’s Internet browser history.

Frequent or time-specific usage of AI platforms such as ChatGPT during homework periods could indicate they might be relying on AI to complete their assignments.

Clicking the relevant links could help identify whether search queries were genuine research-driven assistance or simply providing word-for-word answers.

Utilizing this method of monitoring internet usage can lead clued-up kids to begin deleting the relevant browser history. Should your child cotton on to this, browsers such as Chrome allow you to back up the local history database.

The Bottom Line

Finding a balance between letting children explore and learn from AI’s capabilities rather than just completing tasks such as homework will always be up for debate.

While tools such as anti-plagiarism tools, AI detectors, and parental control software essentially use technology to fight technology, behavioral analysis also plays a part.

Simple factors such as the speed it takes to complete a homework assignment or a child’s apparent willingness to head to their room where before they were reluctant are all possible signs they’ve discovered the dark arts of AI assistants.

From an educator’s standpoint, Colin Parkinson said: “Homework can be designed to include tasks that rely on individual analysis and specific critical analysis that are hard for AI to produce, but the real truth comes out in assessments that occur in class, where a lack of preparation or revision is easily exposed.”

The rise of AI certainly provides an additional learning resource for kids and adults alike, but when used as an easy solution to the time-old issue of doing homework, it only deprives them of the desired result, which is learning itself.

Fortunately, identifying AI usage is almost as easy as using it in the first place. However, if left unchecked, we’re in danger of raising a copy-and-paste generation whose over-reliance on technology might mean they won’t learn anything.

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