ChatGPT and plagiarism: what to watch out for

Thanks to its countless application possibilities, ChatGPT tempts you to generate texts. However, you should be careful not to plagiarise.

ChatGPT and plagiarism – how to avoid plagiarism

Thanks to the vast amount of data that ChatGPT can access, the chatbot is suitable for quickly generating texts of all kinds. Just as with ChatGPT and privacy, there are a few things you should keep in mind when prompting to avoid plagiarism.

• Particularly in an academic context, it is essential that you, as the author, always correctly cite all sources used to create the texts you submit. To guarantee this, you should also always compose and cite the texts yourself.
• The texts generated by ChatGPT use data fed to the AI. So if you ask ChatGPT to write a scientific text on a certain topic, you can write in the prompt that the bot will include all the sources used. In this way, you are able to check the sources and the text you have written.
• Independently of this, the texts written by ChatGPT often do not meet the scientific requirements of universities in terms of quality. Similar to Wikipedia entries, these texts should therefore only be used as a first point of contact for inspiration and should not be used directly in one’s own work.
• It is also important to know that the data set accessed by ChatGPT only lasts until 2021 and the bot cannot access the internet. Thus, the data and information the bot can access is limited. You can easily check this by asking the bot for events from 2022 or 2023.
• It makes much more sense to use the bot as a source of inspiration or as a research tool. For example, ask the bot to provide you with a list of published works on a particular topic. This way you have a solid base of already written papers that you can use as a basis for your own research.