A Russian student successfully defended a diploma written by the ChatGPT neural network. Is it legal at all?

The release of ChatGPT turned our understanding of neural networks upside down. ChatGPT has already been programming, writing articles, and even hiring people. RSUH student Alexander Zhadan decided to try and wrote a diploma with the help of a neural network, which he defended quite successfully, albeit with a C mark.

The student chose “Analysis and improvement of the management of a gaming company” as the topic of the thesis work. And the first attempts to write it through a neural network were unsuccessful. ChatGPT could not cope with the requirements from the university manual, and due to the limit on the number of characters, it could not generate the entire work.

Then Alexander decided to break the task into parts. He started from the 5 principles of management that the neural network issued and asked her to expand on each of the points. The result of the work was a quite tolerable first theoretical part of the chapter. How to generate subsequent ones was already clear.

Of course, there were many edits from the supervisor, but the result was a finished diploma for a solid 82% originality with a minimum threshold of 70%. At the same time, it took the student only 23 hours to write a diploma through ChatGPT. Strange as it may seem, Alexandra was awarded “satisfactory” in defense not for actual shortcomings, but “for a story about a European company and laughter.”

By the revelations of the student on Twitter, “benevolent” citizens could not get past, who had already written a denunciation of Alexander to the university and the Ministry of Education and Science, with a request to deprive the student of a diploma, since “the work was done using a text generator.”

But the student himself is not afraid of denunciations and declares that he does not really need a diploma. Alexander is sincerely convinced that he simply came up with a new algorithm for writing papers. And the squeeze of information that ChatGPT gives is the same search in sources, only much faster.

Twitter users were dissatisfied with the act of the scammer and did not hesitate in their reaction. There has been no reaction from the Russian State Humanitarian University and the Ministry of Education and Science yet.