Top award for young journalist with Mayo connections
A YOUNG journalist with strong Castlebar connections has won the prestigious Hugh Cudlipp Student Award 2023, sponsored by the Daily Mirror, for his work which captured national headlines in the United Kingdom.
London-based Pieter Snepvangers, a son of Pauline Egan, formerly of Mountain View, and Frank Karel Snepvangers, was honoured for revealing how he conducted an experiment by writing an 2,000-word essay by using the AI software programme ChatGPT, and achieving a pass result.
Having secured a degree himself in Politics and Social Policy at Bristol University, he approached a lecturer from another university and asked if he could take their final-year social policy assessment to see if he could spot that AI had written it.
He explained: "I wanted to know, as an experiment, what mark I could get and whether or not he’d spot that the essay was written by an artificial intelligence programme.
"So under the premise of being a third-year social policy student completing a 2,000 word essay worth 75 per cent of a unit about climate change, I got to work.
"The title of the essay was: 'Drawing on the policy literature about various forms of individual and collective action, critically assess what you can do about the climate emergency as an individual and a citizen'.
"I asked ChatGPT just that and asked for a 2,000 word response and for it to provide references. However, as robots go, ChatGPT isn’t particularly obedient.
"If you ask for a 2,000 word response, you do not get 2,000 words back. I got 365. That only got me just over 15 per cent of the way to the word count. In brighter news, I did get four references and it did take all of 30 seconds to get my 365 words."
So Pieter decided to take a different approach by asking 10 different questions and he eventually got 3,500 words back.
He then took the best paragraphs and copied and pasted them in an order that resembled the structure of an essay.
"All in all, it took 20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning. Not bad.
“I nervously send it off to the lecturer and awaited the result."
The lecturer said the essay used 'good, proper language' and he could have been convinced it was written by a student.
"You definitely can't cheat your way to a first class degree, but you can cheat your way to a 2:2 degree," he added.
However, Pieter has put forward the view that ChatGPT is merely a few months old.
"You could not bet on it being able to write an essay being worth of a 2:1 degree in the coming months," he stated.
His investigation impressed the adjudicators of the Hugh Cudlipp Student Award 2023, which carried a prize fund of €1,500.
Pieter and his sister, Megan, are regular summer visitors to the Egan household at Mountain View in Castlebar and also enjoy holiday time in Mulranny. They are grandchildren of the late Eithne and Michael J. Egan.
Pieter told The Connaught Telegraph: "I graduated from the University of Bristol last summer and as someone who wrote lots of my assignments very close to the deadline, I knew if I had an essay that was due the next day and I hadn't written anything yet, I would turn to Google and I'd want to know two things.
"Does ChatGPT actually work, can I use it to write my essay (and get a good grade)? And secondly, will I get caught?
"And while lots of education reporters had written in quite theoretical terms about the use of ChatGPT by students, nobody had answered those two practical questions so that's what I set about to do and I'm delighted it's been recognised with the Hugh Cudlipp award."