10 ms·

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told h

• vondur 10mo ago
  I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.
  • phh 10mo ago
    80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?
    • v9v 10mo ago
      I suppose 80% means you don't give them a 0 mark because the software says it's AI, you only do so if you have other evidence reinforcing the possibility.
      • respondo2134 10mo ago
        no, you multiply their result by .8 to account for the "uncertainty"! /s
    • yoavm 10mo ago
      The promise (not saying that it works) is probably that 20% of people who cheated will not get caught. Not that 20% of the work marked as AI is actually written by humans.
    • CaptainNegative 10mo ago
      It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as well. Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.
    • j45 10mo ago
      I think it means every time AI is used, it will detect it 80% of the time. Not that 20% of the class will marked as using AI.
      • respondo2134 10mo ago
        you're missing out on the false positives though; catching 80% of cheaters might be acceptable but 20% false positives (not the same thing as 20% of the class) would not be acceptable. AI generated content and plagarism are completely different detection problems.
        • j45 10mo ago
          For sure. False positives with technology that is non-deterministic is guaranteed. It's more than slightly comedic people being amazed when LLM math works as it's created to.
    • kelseyfrog 10mo ago
      80% accuracy could mean 0 false negatives and 20% false positives. My point is that accuracy is a terrible metric here and sensitivity, specificity tell us much more relevant information to the task at hand. In that formulation, a specificity < 1 is going to have false positives and it isn't fair to those students to have to prove their innocence.
      • soVeryTired 10mo ago
        That's more like the false positive rate and false negative rate. If we're being literal, accuracy is (number correct guesses) / (total number of guesses). Maybe the folks at turnitin don't actually mean 'accuracy', but if they're selling an AI/ML product they should at least know their metrics.
  • tyleo 10mo ago
    I had Turn It In mark my work as plagiarism some years ago and I had to fight for it. It was clear the teacher wasn’t doing their job and blindly following the tool. What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each section of my report I reiterated the question in italics before answering it. The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.
    • pirates 10mo ago
      This matches my experience pretty well. My high school was using it 15 years ago and it was a spotty, inconsistent morass even back then. Our papers were turned in over the course of the semester, and late into the year you’d get flagged for “plagiarizing” your own earlier paper.
      • SoftTalker 10mo ago
        > you’d get flagged for “plagiarizing” your own earlier paper Wow I'd have been screwed, so many of my high school papers were just rewrites and improvements on stuff I wrote in earlier years.
    • teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
      Funny how it's the teachers that are plagiarizing the work of the tools.
  • vkou 10mo ago
    > but I don’t think anyone here believes that. All it takes is one moron with power and a poor understanding of statistics.
  • jimbob45 10mo ago
    Had a professor use this but it was student-led. We had to run it through ourselves and change our stuff enough to get a high enough mark to pass TurnItIn. Avoided the false allegations problems at least.
  • ball_of_lint 10mo ago
    I have had Turnitin flag my work as plagiarism for quotes from the relevant text that were quite clearly indicated as quotes. It's shit software for schools and teachers to cover their ass. Nothing more, and deserves no more attention.
  • seanw265 10mo ago
    If they are serious they should realize that "80% accuracy" is almost meaningless for this kind of classifier. They should publish a confusion matrix if they haven't already.
• huevosabio 10mo ago
  When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam. The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live. I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.
  • j45 10mo ago
    This is a nice approach. The students who know the material, or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve the objective of learning.
    • onion2k 10mo ago
      It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given those choices I'd pick the third option.
      • mavhc 10mo ago
        4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand. Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught. You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something
        • WalterBright 10mo ago
          > Tests were created to save money I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
• neom 10mo ago
  Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.
  • germinalphrase 10mo ago
    Yes. When I was an educator, reviewing version history was an obvious way to clarify if/how much students plagiarized.
    • respondo2134 10mo ago
      honest q: what would it look like from your perspective if someone worked in entirely different tools and then only moved their finished work to google docs at the end?
      • aprilthird2021 10mo ago
        Shouldn't do that. Can make it clear at syllabus time that this will result in the paper being considered as AI-assisted
      • germinalphrase 10mo ago
        In this case, the school was providing chromebooks so Google Docs were the default option. Using a different computer isn’t inherently a negative signal - but if we are already talking about plagiarism concerns, I’m going to start asking questions that are likely to reveal your understanding of the content. If your understanding falters, I’m going to ask you to prove your abilities in a different way/medium/etc. In general, I don’t really understand educators hyperventilating about LLM use. If you can’t tell what your students are independently capable of and are merely asking them to spit back content at you, you’re not doing a good job.
        • peebee67 10mo ago
          > In general, I don’t really understand educators hyperventilating about LLM use. If you can’t tell what your students are independently capable of and are merely asking them to spit back content at you, you’re not doing a good job. Sounds as though you do understand it.
• bad_haircut72 10mo ago
  Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years
  • stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
    Family law judges, in my small experience, are so uninterested in the basic facts of a case that I would actually trust an LLM to do a better job. Not quite what you mean, but maybe there is a silver lining. We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits. So “the algorithms says you’re guilty” has already been happening in less dramatic ways.
    • reverius42 10mo ago
      In what ways to ad tech firms or non-profits use algorithms to assign you any kind of score that matters for your life?
  • perihelions 10mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 ("Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms (nytimes.com)") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ('Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ("Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 ("Machine Bias (propublica.org)")
    • Terr_ 10mo ago
      https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11374696/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11374696/ > language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of [African American English] be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. This one is just so extra insidious to me, because it can happen even when a well-meaning human has already "sanitized" overt references to race/ethnicity, because the model is just that good at learning (bad but real) signals in the source data.
• johanam 10mo ago
  edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself from AI tool use accusations
  • andrewinardeer 10mo ago
    Ironic that one of the biggest AI companies is also the platform to offer a service to protect yourself from allegations of using it.
  • Ancapistani 10mo ago
    I’m very tempted to write a tool that emulates human composition and types in assignments in a human-like way, just to force academia to deal with their issues sooner.
  • raincole 10mo ago
    The funny part is that Googe has all the edit history data. In other words, it's a piece of cake for them to train a model that mimics human editing process. The only thing prevents them from doing so is the fact Google is too big to sell a "plagiarism assistant."
    • SoftTalker 10mo ago
      So the model is going to spend hours hesitantly typing in a google doc, moving paragraphs around, cutting and pasting, reworking sentences, etc so that the timestamped history matches up with something a human could realistically have done?
• hiddencost 10mo ago
  I seriously think the people selling AI detection tools to teachers should be sued into the ground by a coalition of state attorneys general, and that the tools should be banned in schools.
• j45 10mo ago
  Easy if one of these options might be available to the writer: - Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the google docs, it is date and time stamped. - Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab. If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written apology to remind the future detectors. Edit: clarity
• mettamage 10mo ago
  I would screencast the whole thing and then tell my professor that we can watch a bit together.
• obscurette 10mo ago
  There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.
• rkagerer 10mo ago
  Guess you have to videotape or screen-record yourself writing it. Oh what a world we've created :-S.
  • inerte 10mo ago
    You mean you'll prompt Sora to create a video of you writing the essay :)
    • trashtester 10mo ago
      For now, Sora will not be able to actually produce all the text, I think. Maybe next year.
  • rcv 10mo ago
    ... until you get accused of generating that video with another AI.
    • bigfishrunning 10mo ago
      No fair, i was born with 11 fingers!
• jancsika 10mo ago
  Seems like this could be practically addressed by teachers adopting the TSA's randomized screening. That is, roll some dice to figure out which student on a given assignment comes in either for the oral discussion or-- perhaps in higher grades-- to write the essay in realtime. It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need to stop cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you seed skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the rest of the kids see what the real target of education looks like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks in they learn way better spontaneously from their peers than any other method. Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.
  • WalterBright 10mo ago
    > Kids try their best not to learn Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.
  • oblio 10mo ago
    > Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place. Pre-k is preschool aka kindergarten? Is this really needed? It's really stressful for kids under 5 or 6 to read and is there a big enough statistical difference in outcome enough to rob them of some of their early youth? I started reading around 6 years old and I was probably ahead of the vast majority of kids within 6 months. Kids starting around 6 years old have much better focus and also greatly enhanced mental abilities overall.
• FloorEgg 10mo ago
  Write it in something like Google docs that tracks changes and then share the link with the revision history. If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for education contexts that track student writing process. Detecting the whole essay being copied and pasted from an outside source is trivial. Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. These methods dramatically increase the effort required to get away with having AI do the work for you, which diminishes the benefit of the shortcut and influences more students to do the work themselves. It also protects the honest students from false positives.
  • fuzzythinker 10mo ago
    Thought it is a good idea at first, but can easily be defeated with typing out AI contents. One can add pauses/deletions/edits or true edits from joining ideas different AI outputs.
    • FloorEgg 10mo ago
      > Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. Keystroke dynamics can detect artificial typing patterns (copying another source by typing it out manually). If a student has to go way out of their way to make their behavior appear authentic then it's decreasing advantage of cheating and less students will do it. If the student is integrating answers from multiple AI responses then maybe that's a good thing for them to be learning and the assessment should allow it.
      • darkwater 10mo ago
        It will take 0 time to have some (smarter?) student create an AI agent that mimick keystrokes.
        • FloorEgg 10mo ago
          Not 0 time, but yes, integrity preservation is an arms race. The best solutions are in student motivations and optimal pedagogical design. Students who want to learn, and learning systems that are optimized for rate of learning.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• jstummbillig 10mo ago
  How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed options?
  • eloisant 10mo ago
    Accept to be unjustly marked as a cheater, or submit to a 30-60 minutes interrogation where the teacher think you're guilty and you need to prove that you're innocent. It's only an obvious choice if you have total faith that your teacher will be fair, which you might doubt if the situation starts with "You're a cheater unless you prove me otherwise". In the worse case scenario you'll be grilled for one hour and still be marked as a cheater because you didn't convince the teacher.
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• WalterBright 10mo ago
  My high school history teacher gave me an F on my term paper. I asked him why, and he said it was "too good" for a high school student. The next day I dumped on his desk all the cited books, which were obscure and in my dad's extensive collection. He capitulated, but disliked me ever since.
• totetsu 10mo ago
  on a side note, I wonders if anyone submitting code to github is feeling the same way about the "duplication detection filter" type AI guardrails.
• lumost 10mo ago
  The new trick being used by some professors in college classes is to mandate a specific document editor with a history view. If the document has unusual copy/paste patterns or was written in unusual haste then they may flag it. That being said, they support use of ai in the class and have confidence the student is not able to one shot the assignment with ai.
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    "Please take this finished essay and write me a rough first draft version of it that looks like something someone might type in on the fly before editing"
• deleted 10mo ago
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• hiAndrewQuinn 10mo ago
  I suspect this is going in the wrong direction. Telling a sandboxed AI to have a long conversation with a student to ensure they actually know what they're talking about, while giving minimal hints away, seems like the scalable solution. Let students tackle the material however they will, knowing that they will walk into class the next day and be automatically grilled on it, unaided. There's no reason a similar student couldn't have their essay fed into the AI and then asked questions about what they meant on it. Once this becomes routine the class can become e.g. 10 minutes conversation on yesterday's topic, 40 minutes lecturing and live exercises again. Which is really just reinventing the "daily quiz" approach, but again the thing we are trying to optimize for is compliance.
• edwcross 10mo ago
  Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty". Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers. Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations. This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing how stupid so many teachers are. But when someone spent thousands for a tool, which purports to be reliable, and is so quick to use, how can an average person resist it? The teacher is as lazy as the cheaters they intend to catch.
  • icsa 10mo ago
    In the United States, we all used to take a required course called Civics. We learned how government and justice worked.
  • trashtester 10mo ago
    Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this. The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work. Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school. But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working. And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.
    • ghaff 10mo ago
      It's also the case that even pre-Web and certainly pre-LLMs, different schools and even departments within schools had different rules about working with other students on problem sets. In some cases, that was pretty much the norm, in others strictly verboten.
  • miki123211 10mo ago
    > Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.
• bradgessler 10mo ago
  I wrote a paper about building web applications in 10th grade a long time ago. When class was out the teacher asked me to stay for a minute after everybody left. He asked in disbelief, “did you really write that paper?” I could see why he didn’t, so I wasn’t offended or defensive and started to tell him the steps required to build web apps and explained it in a manner he could understand using analogies. Towards the end of our conversation he could see I both knew about the topic and was enthusiastic about it. I think he was still a bit shocked that I wrote that paper, but he could tell from the way I talked about it that it was authentic. It will be interesting to see how these situations evolve as AI gets even better. I suspect assessment will be more manual and in-person.
• randcraw 10mo ago
  It's not that hard to prove that you did the work and not an AI. Show your work. Explain to the teacher why you wrote what you did, why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to you and you chose that as the basis for your work. Show an outline on which the paper was based. Show rough drafts. Explain how you revised the work, where you found your references, and why you retained some sources in the paper and not others. To wit, show the teacher that YOU did the work and not someone else. If the teacher is not willing to do this with every student they accuse of malfeasance, they need to find another job. They're lazy as hell and suck at teaching.
  • beeflet 10mo ago
    I agree, it isn't hard! Watch: Computer, show "my" work and explain to the teacher why "I" wrote what "I" did, describe why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to "me" and "I" chose that as the basis of "my" work. Produce an outline on which the paper could have been based and possible rough drafts, then explain how I could have revised the work to produce the final result.
    • SoftTalker 10mo ago
      And if you do all of that, and memorize it well enough to have an in-person debate with the teacher over whether or not you did the work, then maybe that's close enough to actually doing the work?
      • beeflet 10mo ago
        Computer, experience this tragic irony for me
• ball_of_lint 10mo ago
  You don't convince the teacher, you talk with the Dean.
• lll-o-lll 10mo ago
  > My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.
  • throwaway31131 10mo ago
    You hinted to it but at what point are you basically giving individual oral exams to the entire class for every assignment? There are surveys where 80% of high school students self report using AI on assignments. I guess we could go back to giving exams soviet Russia style where you get a couple of questions that you have to answer orally in front of the whole class and that’s your grade. Not fun…
    • lll-o-lll 10mo ago
      Sounds good! Why not?
      • oblio 10mo ago
        Stress levels for introverts.
        • amrocha 10mo ago
          You’re gonna have to talk about your work to people that matter at some point in your life. You can’t keep hiding behind being an introvert your whole life.
          • oblio 10mo ago
            1. I'm not introvert :-) 2. Speaking about your work in front of 1-2-5 people is one thing, but being tested in front of an entire class (30 people?) is a totally different thing.
• globalnode 10mo ago
  its defamation. flimsy proof like that needs to be sued.
• somenameforme 10mo ago
  I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct. So why is the issue you described an issue? Because it's about a grade. And the reason that's relevant is because that credential will then be used to determine where she can to to university which, in turn, is a credential that will determine her breadth of options for starting her career, and so on. But why is this all done by credentials instead of simple demonstrations of skill? What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting. This is how you used to apply to colleges. Here [1], for instance, is Harvard's exam from 1869. If you pass it, you're in. Simple as that. Obviously this creates a problem of institutions starting to 'teach the test', but with sufficiently broad testing I don't see this as a problem. If a writing class can teach somebody to write a compelling essay based on an arbitrary prompt, then that was simply a good writing class! As an aside this would also add a major selling point to all of the top universities that offer free educational courses online. Right now I think 'normal' people are mostly disinterested in those because of the lack of widely accepted credentials, which is just so backwards - people are actively seeking to maximize credentials over maximizing learning. This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization. [1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
  • disgruntledphd2 10mo ago
    > This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization. Just so we're clear, the coding tests are in addition to credentialisation. I'll never forget when I worked at Big Tech (from Ireland) and I would constantly hear recruiters talk about the OK school list (basically the Ivy league). Additionally, I remember having to check the University a candidate had attended before she had an interview with one of our directors. He was fine with her, because she had gone to Oxford. Honestly, I'm surprised that I was able to get hired there given all this nonsense.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• teekert 10mo ago
  Yeah, this, but also as an adult; When you are a non-native speaker and you use AI to make things more concise and correct. The detector will go off. People may find some wording "AI-ish" (even though I replaced em-dashes with commas and told it to "avoid American waiter-like enthusiasm"). My reaction is: Ok. you want my original? Which is much harder to read and uses 2x the amount of words? Fine. I mean, what is the problem? It's my report! I know all the ins and outs, I take full responsibility for it. I'm the one taking this to the board of directors who will grill me on all the details. I'm up for it. So why is this so "not done"? Why do you assume I let the AI do the "thinking"? I'm appalled by your lack of trust in me.
  • Borealid 10mo ago
    Is it possible the same problems that cause you to write less-readable words also lead you to choose poor AI outputs? If no, why not? Personally I would rather read a human's output than their selection of machine outputs.
    • teekert 10mo ago
      I guess you've never read the English of a Dutch person ;) During my PhD defense I was told I "should have checked with a native speaker." Pre-LLMs, I'd go to my American colleague and she'd mostly remove text and rewrite some bit to make texts much more readable. Nowadays, often I put my text into the LLM, and say: Make more concise, include all original points, don't be enthusiastic, use business style writing. And then it will come with some lines of which I think: Yes! That is what I meant! I can't imagine you'd rather read my Dunglish. Sure, I could have "studied harder", but one simply is just much more clever in their native tongue, I know more words, more subtleties etc. Over time, and I believe due to LLM use I do get better at it myself! It's a language model after all, not a facts model. I can trust it to make nice sentences.
      • Borealid 10mo ago
        I am telling you my own preferences, as a native speaker of English. I would rather read my coworkers' original output in their voice than read someone else's writing (including a machine edit of their own text).
• nephihaha 10mo ago
  I've had the same problem online for years, when I translate something people presume I am using Google Translate (even though in one case said language isn't on Google Translate — I checked!)... Or got the answer off Wikipedia. One of the funniest things was being accused of plagiarising Wikipedia, when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.
  • gspencley 10mo ago
    > when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it. Surely it would be relatively easy to offer to show the edit history to prove that you actually contributed to the article? And, by doing so, would flip the situation in your favour by demonstrating your expertise? The fact that you should have to is pretty annoying but also fairly edge case. And if a teacher or institute refuses to review that evidence then I don't think the credential on the table worth the paper it's printed on anyway.
• wartywhoa23 10mo ago
  Welcome to the post-truth society so many were and are so eager to build.
• 4pkjai 10mo ago
  When I was a university student in 2009 a lecturer accused me of plagiarising a c++ win32 project I submitted. It turned out he ran it through a plagiarism detector and multiple lines of code where identical to lines in their database. It was very silly because there’s a lot of boiler plate code in win32 projects
• bluenose69 10mo ago
  The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead. Of course, there will be complaints from many students. However, as a prof for decades, I can say that some will prefer an exam-based solution. This includes the students who are working their way through university and don't have much time for busy-work, along with students who write their essays themselves and get lower grades than those who do not.
• FooBarBizBazz 10mo ago
  If you, like AI, have been trained on real literature -- perhaps including em-dashes, as real books do -- then you might register as AI. but if u talk like this boss i had, then obv ur a human, kthx Great incentives. /s
• apwell23 10mo ago
  > how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? She can't because she didn't write the essay herself, obviously.
  • _vqpz 10mo ago
    You joke but I would be willing to bet this is actually the case.
• snarf21 10mo ago
  The real problem here is (in this case) lazy teachers. These kind of tools should only be used to flag potential AI generation. If the teacher read the essay and thought it reflected standard work for this student, then all would be fine. Instead they are just running the tool first to be lazy and taking the tool as gospel. This reminds me of when GPS routing devices first came onto the scene. Lots of people drove right into a lake or ocean because the device said keep going straight. (because of poorly classified multi-modal routing data)
• theptip 10mo ago
  Yeah, these AI detector tools are bad. (They also punish ESL as this tends to result in simpler language patterns that parse as LLM.) The great thing about AI is that with a bit of imagination it can be used to amplify teachers too. In this case, yes, you need to do a viva voce to convince the teacher (though I suspect they should be able to get fairly confident in 10-15 minutes). But you could also have students convince an AI (probably in a proctored space?) if you need to scale this approach out.
• swah 10mo ago
  Vídeo of her typing the essay>?
• motbus3 10mo ago
  That's an interesting point. It seems it makes cheaper to provide knowledge but more expensive to have individual assessments. I think AI got me some brain rot as I concern to finish stuff on time and I can't bare to spend brain energy on that (and spend on it anyway because AI sucks)
• rdudek 10mo ago
  This stuff is getting more pervasive too. I'm working on my Master's degree right now and any code I submit, I make sure it has spelling mistakes and make it god awful because I don't want to get flagged by some 3rd party utility that checks if it was AI generated or copied from someone else.
  • JTon 10mo ago
    Is this how you defeat AI detection? I.e. Generate a report, then manually introduce spelling and/or grammatical errors?
• ako 10mo ago
  My son recently told me his teacher used him as an example for the class as someone who wrote a good piece himself. Teacher accused all the other students of using AI. He also told me that he had in fact used AI, but asked AI multiple times to simplify the text, and he had entered the simplified version. He liked the first version best, but was aware his teacher would consider it written by AI. Guess the teachers have already lost...
  • scruple 10mo ago
    Further, what's to stop anyone from pumping text into an LLM and then re-writing it's output to match their own style, etc.?
    • jerf 10mo ago
      Nothing. Word is getting around about how to do this. I anticipate that in another couple of years it'll have diffused to everyone, except the constant crew of new younglings who have to find out and be told about it from their older siblings and such. "AI detection" wasn't even a solution in the short term and it won't be going forward. Take-home essays are dead, the teachers are collectively just hoping some superhero will swoop in and somehow save them. Sometimes such a thing is possible, but it isn't going to happen this time.
      • scruple 10mo ago
        Yes. The ship has sailed and in fact it sailed away many, many years ago. Modernity now has to reckon with Brandolini's law at the scale of these AI systems, which, depending on the system you're inside of, can vary from "this is easy to refute" to "don't bother, assume it's all bullshit."
    • jairuhme 10mo ago
      I wonder if doing this would actually be a step closer to learning (from not doing anything at all). To put it in your own style, you are forced to read the output and probably understand the basic concepts of what the LLM provides
• MisterTea 10mo ago
  Years ago in the 90's my brother wrote a short story for a fourth grade assignment and the teacher accused him of plagiarism because how could a 9 year old come up with such a vivid and elaborate story so he received a zero. I forget the details but my mother went to the school making a big stink and eventually had the zero changed to an A.
• RobRivera 10mo ago
  It creates another layer of arbitrary gate-keeping. I experience this in interviews too. If I need to think about the low latency response I can give to derive djikstras algo verbatim, I get accused of reading notes on another monitor, not someone who studied for success. It is beginning to become an awful situation where these companies are selling tools that undermine the student. Education is suppose to be the great equalizer in society, not another toggle or tool for oppression.