Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnain of Universiti Putra Malaysia said this in response to concerns that AI-driven ChatGPT can produce such reports.

“The originality (of academic) reports and papers is very important,” she said at a forum when asked about measures to prevent AI-aided plagiarism in academia.

“Therefore, there should be a mechanism introduced by the university (which) would figure out whether the works were done by the students from their research findings or through outsourced (assistance) and (AI) technology.”

Zuriati added that these mechanisms could be implemented in classrooms as well as in non-academic activities. As for postgraduate students, their supervisors can use a particular mechanism to verify the originality of their work.

Launched last November, ChatGPT is designed to mimic human-like conversation. Its responses are almost indistinguishable from the human-written text.

Last month, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that ChatGPT was able to score between a B- and B for the school’s Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme.

At the same forum, data scientist and AI expert Poo Kuan Hoong said ChatGPT would be designed to be more intelligent in the next five years.

He said ChatGPT would be developed to be utilised in healthcare and other sectors.

“This (AI) technology will be trained in more specific domains and can actually (provide) more reliable and accurate answers.”