Now, I’ve heard about this student who got caught for using ChatGPT for writing his university assignment. It got me thinking. The way I use ChatGPT is: I write about a topic as usual (let’s say a couple of paragraphs) and then I tell ChatGPT to improve the text fixing punctuation, grammar mistakes, etc. More often than not ChatGPT rewrites the paragraphs in a subtle way (which I like), and the quality of the text is almost perfect (for a non native English speaker like myself).
Would this usage be considered plagiarism? If so, why? If not, how can future tools (that will try to check if some text was written by ChatGPT) distinguish between my use case and other use cases like simply asking ChatGPT to write entire paragraphs by giving it a simple prompt?
I also believe that the way we use the tool has been evolving with the developments of these tools: When using Google, it is important to know what search terms to use. When using Grammarly, it is important to know what suggestions to accept and what to ignore. When using ChatGPT, the skill is in asking the right question.
Using ChatGPT in the way you described, as a tool to assist and improve your own writing, should not be considered plagiarism.
I really like ChatGPT as a companion for my ideas and thoughts, if you find it useful to use it like this, why not?