Artificial intelligence, text generation tools and ChatGPT – does digital watermarking offer a solution?

Abstract Text generation tools, often presented as a form of generative artificial intelligence, have the potential to pose a threat to the integrity of the educational system. They can be misused to afford students marks and qualifications that they do not deserve. The emergence of recent tools, such as ChatGPT, appear to have left the educational community unprepared, despite the fact that the computer science community has been working to develop and improve such tools for years. This paper provides an introduction to text generation tools intended for a non-specialist audience, discussing the types of assessments that students can outsource, showing the type of prompts that can be used to generate text, and illustrating one possible watermarking technique that may allow generated text to be detected. A small-scale study into watermarking suggests that this technique is feasible and show technical promise but should not be relied on as a solution to widespread use of artificial intelligence based tools by students. Alternative solutions are needed, including encouraging the educational community to work with artificial intelligence rather than against it. As such, the paper concludes by discussing seven potential areas for further exploration.