Operator (OpenAI Agent) and your LMS
3rd parties are 3rd parties
If you haven’t heard, OpenAI’s Computer Using Agent was launched today, they call it Operator. It comes with a hefty price tag ($200 a month) to start but essentially acts like a coachable person, capable of web navigation.
You all know Essay Mills as part of a larger illicit market: Contract Cheating. That would include paying someone to take your course completely.
This has been coming for a while and I know it is not strictly Essay Mill-related. But I do think you should be aware (and talking about) that for less than the cost of a contract cheating bill (which can range to $1000s for a course, a similarly minded student can direct an AI to achieve the same thing for a fraction of the cost).1
Below are two videos:
1. Video demonstrating how easily Operator navigates and completes low-hanging writing assignments within the LMS (Moodle)
2. Video demonstrating Cursive’s Moodle plugin tripping up the submission process
The outcome of the latter would look like this with Cursive for Moodle:
on the one hand, this innovation will continue to put downward pressure on existing contract cheating sites and rings. We should rejoice that AI can’t extort students after the fact.