For nearly an entire semester last year, a student enrolled in an online Masters-level course in health administration at a University in South Carolina was doing really well, participating in class discussion boards, contributing to live online seminars, and getting very high marks on written work and quizzes. But it was not a student at all. It was an AI chatbot – ChatGPT (GPT-4) – surreptitiously enrolled in the course as part of a test by academic researchers. They wanted to see whether a chatbot could do graduate-level coursework, and whether the work of a chatbot would be noticed or caught by anyone.
