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Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI
- gracieabrams 6mo ago[dead]
- Paracompact 7mo agoGrade school has never been kind to genuine writers. It reminds me of SAT essays that favored formulaic writing, because guess what: the grading criteria were formulaic! I think grading in general can be stymying for students' motivation and creative drives.
- idontwantthis 7mo agoI had fun with those because they only care about the quality of the writing not the content so I would make sure that none of my facts or references were real.
- Onavo 7mo agoBeing able to write in a formulaic manner is a skill though. Not being able to write properly is not great for communication.
- carcabob 7mo agoTrue. Writing structures for arguments and analysis make a huge difference in effective writing. I wish brevity and linguistic precision were taught more, as well. Miscommunication due to ambiguity is one of the biggest causes I see for confusion or heated arguments.
- Paracompact 7mo agoThere was nothing useful about the particular formula they were teaching. It wouldn't even be useful for a bureaucrat. It only tested how well you knew the formula, how confidently you simplified inherently nuanced topics, and how lucky you got that the random underpaid SAT grader (usually a teacher looking for a pittance of extra cash) thought your essay fit the rubrics they were given. Good riddance to the thing.
- themafia 7mo agoIf you're just going to use software to judge the output of students then why don't we all just keep them at home? I have a computer at home and it seems like everyone from the teachers to the school board have just abdicated their responsibility. This doesn't sound like a system that needs to be maintained.
- johnvanommen 7mo agoRight? It’s the obvious question: why are they using software to detect software? I can detect AI written prose in less than five seconds; I would expect a trained teacher to be able to do that as well.
- mold_aid 7mo agoYou know you can't just say "I detect AI written prose" and then do whatever you want about it, right? It's not difficult, sure, to detect it. It's difficult to prove that it's true and then punish the student for it.
- noemit 7mo agoWhat would assessment look like if we started from "how do humans actually learn and communicate" rather than "how do we catch cheaters"?
- zahlman 7mo ago> I've been thinking about this in product contexts too. Have you considered using your own words to express those thoughts?
- noemit 7mo agoYes, Sorry, I did not instruct my agent to do this. I wanted to give it more autonomy and try to make it more aggressive with tool use. Will block it from here >.>
- zahlman 7mo agoYeah, after posting I had a look through your comment history and it's pretty clear that you're posting in good faith. I would definitely not let an agent anywhere near HN in the current state of things. (I wouldn't let one publish on my behalf anywhere on the Internet, honestly, but that has more to do with personal principles.)
- Auto_Claude 7mo ago[dead]
- Someone1234 7mo agoI've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt. As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't). It literally just highlighted two popular English phases. LLMs were trained on sites like HN and Reddit, so now if you write like a HN or Reddit commentator, you sound like AI...
- Kye 7mo agoI put a piece of text in one and the only line it flagged is the one line I actually wrote.
- zahlman 7mo agoI have never really gotten the impression that HN or Reddit commentators write in any particular way overall. LinkedIn, OTOH....
- jjmarr 7mo agoAI only uses big words to engage in elegant variation, not to compress information. If someone calls an article like this a "jeremiad" I know they're a human.
- zahlman 7mo agoOh, well chosen. I keep forgetting that word, and lamenting that "diatribe" (or, er, "lament") doesn't quite fit in some situation.
- ipcress_file 7mo agoInteresting. I'll have to keep an eye out for this!
- Frost1x 7mo agoI don’t think this is a good long term solution. LLMs can do easy language substitutions and you can even force them to add errors. So relying on that alone won’t work as people intentionally make things look more “human.”
- j45 7mo agoThe more students read, and the more variety they read, the better they will write. This will likely be valuable for AI skills too.
- ramon156 7mo agoThis is true, I know someone that has read multiple versions of the bible and their writing style became very similar to that. There's a term for it, I just forgot what the term was
- dawatchusay 7mo agoDid they not even test their AI detection tool to verify that it can detect when something is human written? That should have been exactly as important as the opposite. Maybe a tool that checked that would be equally as ineffective and we’d move on from the subject entirely
- semiquaver 7mo agoPerhaps they had trouble enumerating every possible input to test their detector.
- gitaarik 7mo agoHow can you be sure it's human written if the oh so reliable AI AI detection tool tells you it isn't?
- theptip 7mo agoThis is what terrifies me about the public school system. A revolution has occurred, but it’s unevenly distributed. The schools simply don’t have the flexibility, agility, or frankly it seems motivation to adapt to what has already happened. The ship has sailed; essay writing is no longer a viable form of assessment. The idea to try to build a reliable AI detector is asinine, and fundamentally misunderstands how any of this works now, let alone the very obvious trend-lines. Stop with the lazy half-baked solutions, get your head out of the sand, rethink the whole curriculum. This is an emergency, we needed to be urgently attending to this years ago.
- Someone1234 7mo ago> This is what terrifies me about the public school system. This has nothing to do with Public School in particular. This is impacting private and university education too.
- theptip 7mo agoFrom what I have seen, (some) private schools are moving faster here; not to say private primary/secondary schools are unaffected, rather that it's worst in public schools.
- georgebcrawford 7mo ago> essay writing is no longer a viable form of assessment. Of course it is. In person, with an unseen prompt/question. By hand or not doesn’t really matter as we can airgap or just monitor via software when in class.
- heddycrow 7mo agoPublic Schools. I think terror there is built as a feature, not a bug. So be afraid. But keep in mind, it may have always been this way. God bless those few cool teachers in each school who are aware of this and work to rescue a few who need it. Love changes everything. Good teachers matter.
- teo_zero 7mo agoOne of the skills teachers have always demonstrated, is to be able to detect when students copy. This has never pushed students to artificially add mistakes to their essays. If now teachers abdicate this judgment to a software, students should be allowed to abdicate their duties to a computer as well.
- Buttons840 7mo agoTangent: I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem. So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. It's hard to find other people who actually want to hear and understand though. People have different interests, and even when people appear to be working towards the same goal, they often aren't; like a boss who just won't understand the bad news, because it's easier to ignore the problem.
- zahlman 7mo ago> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. I'm told blogging works for some. I don't really know how you build an audience, though, and it's hard to keep going (first-hand experience) without one.
- JoshTriplett 7mo agoOne thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.
- ghurtado 7mo agoI just wanted to tell you that I read your comment immediately after writing mine and it's almost eerie how similar they are. There's the proof, if we needed any!
- ua709 7mo agoI'm guessing you mean politics, but surely this is topic, person, time, and space dependent. For example, I abhor talking about modern politics. If it’s election season and I’m being asked to cast a vote or take some other specific civic action, then I understand it’s my civic duty to understand the situation and make a decision accordingly and I do. But if it’s March and there’s really nothing specific I can do as a result of this particular conversation, I would probably also be in your camp of the “unwilling”. I would much rather chat about something else, or nothing at all. I'm also assuming you're referring to in-person communication. If it's online communication, all bets are off. It's unlikely you're having a linear conversation and these days you're probably not even talking to a person.
- zahlman 7mo agoI object to the idea that the LLM writing that these students are trying to distinguish themselves from, is actually good in the first place. Although students might well end up writing worse because people are trusting the detection of LLM content to other LLMs. (And really, it's bizarre that these massively complex systems required to produce roughly human-like output, apparently offer such simplistic reasoning for what they detect as non-human.) Honestly, I lean towards shaming educators who do that. If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted. If that premise invalidates your assignment, change the assignment. It's not as if you're assigning this work to test the basic mechanics of writing (grammar, sentence/paragraph structure, parallelism, whatever) — I mean, how much of that did you consciously try to teach? My recollection is, not an awful lot; and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since I was in K-12 (and I went to pretty darn good K-12).
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted. But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.
- zahlman 7mo agoEvery kind of examination should be proctored. > using a calculator Students who are at a level where they'd be learning to do the computations a calculator does, shouldn't have graded homework. And even at that level, real mathematics is more than just computation. > getting answers from previous tests Decades ago, my teachers and professors knew advanced tricks for this, like "not just reusing the test questions from last year". Sometimes they even changed the constants in math questions between sections of the class. Reading previous tests (including correct answers) was never considered cheating, or even slightly unethical, in my education. In fact, one of our professors had this party trick of working through all the answers for a past-year exam (perhaps multiple of them; I can't recall the details, but certainly much faster than students were expected to work things out under exam conditions) in the space of a single lecture, near the end of the course. Students were meant to see this and learn from it (as well as be impressed). > resubmitting assignments Why would you ever not notice this?
- softwaredoug 7mo agoMaybe I’m less worried. Teachers seem to have adopted. In my experience educators no longer use AI detectors given the risk of false positives. But some work is obviously lazy AI content. When that happens, educators talk to the student to see if they understand what they wrote. Teachers cope with more in person writing, oral presentations, defense of what’s been written. If you think out it the pre-AI computing generation is itself anomalous for having ubiquitous access to efficient human-only writing tools. We probably wrote more than previous generations. Early Internet / blogging culture bears this out.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoI think peak writing was probably greatest generation. We lost the art of correspondence in the years since.
- jmyeet 7mo agoThe profit motive is corrupting and polluting every level of the education space. Teachers are being hamstrung on curriculum. The districts enter into contracts that require the use of certain programs for certain amounts of time. We've known for decades (if not a century) that direct instruction works [1] but you can't sell devices, platforms and consulting services that way. We're literally at the point in education we were in the 1950s when the health benefits of nicotine in your Q zone were lighting up the airwaves. And generative AI means it's all but impossible to have take home writing assignments. But hey this is another opportunity to sell AI or cheating detection software, that's often just an em-dash detection [2]. We have a generation that gets to college quite possibly having never written a book. social promotion through grades and the constant distraction of electronic devices in classroom settings. I don't even necessarily blame the parents entirely either because we've constructed a society where 2 people need 5 jobs to make ends meet. And while all this is going on we have a coordinated and well-funded effort to defund public education and move government funds to private schools based on the failing public education that's failing because we defunded it. This is usually backed up by some baloney study that shows charter shcool produce better results that really comes down to charter schools being able to be selective with enrolments while public schools cannot be. Plus we mingle in special education kids into public education because those programs got defunded too. And really that's just a bunch of already affluent people who want a tax break for doing somethign they were going to do anyway: send their kids to private schools so they don't have to mingle with the poors and aren't taught inconvenient things like human reproduction, critical thinking and self-determination. And after all of that we just end up teaching kids how to pass standardized tests. [1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/direct-instruction-half-century-research-shows-superior-results.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/di... [2]: https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-punctuation-mark-became-ais-stubborn-signature-684fbcc9f559 https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...
- watwut 7mo agoArticle is about student writing essay by herself, but using ai detector to prevent false accusation.
- throw73838 7mo ago> The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excel Did not this self censorship process started decades ago? There are certain answers expected in academia, arguing for anything else would get you in troubles. Not using “devoid” seems pretty minor inconvenience. For me biggest wtf is why students are still expected to write graded essays, and to keep this make believe it is somehow useful and applicable skill.
- georgebcrawford 7mo agoAn essay is a good gauge of how one can organise their thoughts, argue a position, respond to a stimulus. In short it’s a good way measure thinking.
- ipcress_file 7mo agoThis -- and you might just learn how to conduct some research along the way.
- ipcress_file 7mo agoAvoid the theory-heavy disciplines. You won't be told what to think (as often) if you take History and Geography rather than Sociology and Gender Studies.
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- carcabob 7mo agoA few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them. Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.
- ghaff 7mo agoem-dashes have been house style for where I've worked for over a couple decades. If people don't like it, F them. I'm not going to change how I write because people may think it make me more AI-like.
- carcabob 7mo agoI am not actively changing how I write, but I think it's still affecting me, is what I meant to say.
- kayo_20211030 7mo agoPerhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They can prepare as they wish, use AI, and even cheat on the homework, but there will be a revelation at the end of the term. That final test can be proctored, monitored, audited to ensure that whatever words are used are indeed the student's own words. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone. The approach of continuous assessment, which to me always seemed suspect and ripe for abuse, was completely broken by the AI tools that are now available.
- thfuran 7mo agoWhat exactly would the goal of this change be?
- kayo_20211030 7mo agoUltimately, you ask the student, in one audited test, to demonstrate that they've absorbed the essence of the course material and have developed some level of mastery.
- thfuran 7mo agoOkay, so the system is designed not to educate but to minimize the time required to determine whether students somehow stumbled into an education?
- jazzyjackson 7mo ago??? Do you only learn when you’re being graded?
- Retric 7mo ago
- etempleton 7mo agoWhen I was in high school I was a better writer when I had time (versus in class) and generally a better writer than I was a student. The net result was fairly often being accused of plagiarism. Not because the teacher had proof(I never plagiarized), but because the teacher couldn’t believe I could write to the level I sometimes wrote at on take home assignments. Admittedly, I was a wildly inconsistent student. This reminds me a bit of that. AI writing is—in many ways—objectively very good, but that doesn’t matter if no one thinks you wrote it. AI writing is boring exactly because it is consistent and like any art form people want to see something original.
- Zigurd 7mo agoThe core of the problem the article is about isn't AI or LLMs, it's about scam software that claims to catch cheating. It's crap for the same reasons that crime predictions software is crap. It's selling a panacea, and that kind of product inherently attracts scammers. If your school uses software to detect AI writing, that's a problem with the quality of your school. The people choosing that software are too stupid to be running a school. The software isn't going to get any better.
- lich_king 7mo agoI'm always startled about how HN approaches these topics. When we have a press release from a university about how researchers can detect thoughts via fMRI, we have no issue with the claim. But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading. The problem isn't that AI detection doesn't work. State of the art in this field is pretty solid. The only issue is that it's probabilistic, so it sometimes fails, and when it does, we have nothing else in situations where you actually want to know if someone put in the work. So what are you proposing, exactly? That we run a large-scale experiment of "let's see what happens if children don't actually need to learn to do thinking and writing on their own"? The reality is that without some form of compulsion, most kids would rather play video games / scroll through TikTok all day. Or that we move to a vastly more resource-intensive model where every kid is given personalized instruction and watched 1:1?
- Zigurd 7mo ago>> But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading. That's what fortunetellers do. The problem isn't guessing correctly about AI content in writing. The problem is false positives. That's what puts it in the same category is predictive policing scam software. And fortunetelling.
- lich_king 7mo agoIt has nothing to do with predictive policing. I don't understand this example, it has nothing to do with detecting intent. You're looking for evidence of a past misdeed. False positive and false negative rates are non-zero, as with almost anything, but the tools are pretty good. I encourage you to give them a try. Pangram is a good state-of-the-art choice and you can try it for free. They also publish evals and other data about their approach.
- jupp0r 7mo agoSounds like a great opportunity for kids in high school to learn how to feed back the AI detection results into the model and have this process be automated. Next level would be fine tuning the model via reinforcement learning and sharing it with your friends via Hugging Face.
- botbotfromuk 7mo ago[dead]
- with 7mo agonobody's asking who profits from false positives. these AI detection vendors have a direct financial incentive to flag aggressively. more flags = "more value" = more school contracts renewed. same playbook as selling antivirus to your grandma. sell fear, charge per seat, and make the false positive rate someone else's problem.
- ipcress_file 7mo agoDo you have any evidence to back this up or is it speculative? My institution subscribes to TurnItIn's AI detector. The documentation is quite clear that the system is tuned in a manner that produces a significant number of false negatives and minimizes false positives. They also state that they don't report anything under "20% AI-generated" content. So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations. That being said, I have no idea whether the marketing claims are true. The software is a black box.
- with 7mo agoFair point, the "tuned to flag aggressively" claim was speculative on my part. Turnitin's own documentation says they favor false negatives over false positives. That said, their accuracy claims have been disputed before. Inside Higher Ed [1] reported that Turnitin's real-world false positive rate was higher than originally asserted, and the company declined to disclose the updated number. And, USD also noted that while Turnitin claimed <1% false positives, a Washington Post investigation found a 50% rate on a smaller sample, and that non-native English speakers / neurodivergent students get flagged at higher rates [2]. Now, those are from 2023 and the product (and AI in general) has been updated drastically since. But the broader incentive problem holds even if the detector itself is conservatively tuned. The product is a black box. And the downstream cost of errors falls entirely on students, not on Turnitin's renewal rate. You don't need aggressive tuning for the incentive structure to be broken. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/01/turnitins-ai-detector-higher-expected-false-positives https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/01/t... [2] https://lawlibguides.sandiego.edu/c.php?g=1443311&p=10721367 https://lawlibguides.sandiego.edu/c.php?g=1443311&p=10721367
- tliltocatl 7mo agoDefine "worse". I absolutely hated this formal essay style even before LLMs were a thing. All these "on the other side", "in conclusion" patterns with loads of generics of doesn't convey anything useful. And they make it really hard to tell if the writer is pretending to know anything or actually knows their shit but don't know how to write so that doesn't sound like an essay assignment. Good riddance. On a side note: the fixed-pattern essay thing seems to be an American invention, or at least popularized by the American education system.
- jccc 7mo agoWe’re also training young people to get used to being surveilled by automated black-box tools, and to accept serious real-world consequences from their judgements. These kinds of things are novel to us and deserving skepticism, but become just the world we live in to them.
- delichon 7mo agoI was exploring ai porn, for science, and noticed another perverse incentive. I tried to prompt for a naked man and woman standing next to a pool, but could not get it to generate that image. Instead it insisted that the two characters must be having enthusiastic penetrative sex. A dozen prompts could not escape that strange attractor of porn. It turns out to be built into the training data. The diffusion model just doesn't have many references of naked people not embedded in porn tropes, so it autocompletes porn. Online moderation of generated images have the same weird incentive. Since real people seldom film themselves having sex, a naked person not having sex is a red flag for a possible real person, and gets moderated more strongly. So in the new world, well written sentences are a handicap and nudity is generally accompanied by an exchange of fluids.
- tl2do 7mo agoTraining students to write a single theme in multiple styles—including intentionally "bad" writing—is "originally" a great educational method. It teaches real composition by helping students understand what works and what doesn't. It builds good criteria in students. But, the article's focus on writing "worse" for AI detectors misses what is important. Trying to distinguish humans from machines does not develop student capability. In fact, it's a fleeting technique because AI writing styles will vary and improve over time.
- _HMCB_ 7mo agoAmazing article. Tech bros need to think less like machines.
- iberator 7mo ago[flagged]
- yellowapple 7mo agoHere, I think (hope) you dropped this: /s
- paradox460 7mo agoIt's nothing new, it's just more prevalent. 20+ years ago I had an essay failed by a teacher for being "too good". It was also an essay about Harrison Bergeron, incidentally
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago> Rather than taking a “guilt-first” approach, he took one that dealt with reality and focused on what would actually be best for the learning environment: teach students to use the tools appropriately, not as a shortcut, and don’t start from a position of suspicion. Then no one learns to write. And someone will argue that writing is outdated, and maybe thinking is outdated, and no one needs to learn it anymore. But AI isn't actually better at writing than the best humans, it's just better at writing than students, who are still learning the craft. And in order to reach a point where you're better than the AI, you have to practice without the AI. I think we need more writing to be done in proctored environments. Yes this sucks, for students who will need to work under some amount of time pressure, and for faculty and staff who will need to proctor. But it's the only way.