ChatGPT, Plagiarism, and Multilingual Students’ Learning to Write

ChatGPT has been at the center of media coverage since its public release at the end of 2022. Given ChatGPT’s capacity for generating human-like text on a wide range of subjects, it is not surprising that educators, especially those who teach writing, have raised concerns regarding the implications of generative AI tools on issues of plagiarism and academic integrity. How do we navigate the already complex discourse around what constitutes plagiarism and how much assistance is acceptable within the bounds of academic integrity? As we contemplate these theoretical questions, a more practical approach is to assess what these tools can do to facilitate students’ learning of existing academic integrity codes. In this short piece, we share our exploratory interactions with ChatGPT relevant to issues of plagiarism and academic integrity, hoping to shed light on how writing instructors can use the tool to facilitate the teaching and learning of ethics in academic writing.