ChatGPT’s creator makes a point of protecting against academic dishonesty. It’s not a big deal but for now it might have to do

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has legislative power to “to protect and enhance the academic integrity of courses provided by higher education providers by prohibiting academic cheating services.”

ChatGPT is not intended for cheats but it is a fair bet that it will be used within weeks to produce essays. And what happens if (well, when, actually) academic cheating businesses work out ways to anonymise their using it for ill intent?

Probably plenty that regulators can’t do much to stop.

TEQSA’s act of parliament allows it to force ISPs to block domain names of contract cheating providers and search engines not to identify same.

But ChatGPT and imminent imitators will be ubiquitous in commerce and society, by about Thursday fortnight. US CBS News reports ChatGPT had 57m active users in its first month.

Demand from students inclined to cheat seems unavoidable but legislation to bar ChatGPT from  university addresses, when it is available to everybody else, would take some drafting.