A student I know texted me, the ai detector kept falsely flagging his work. “This is how I write!” I gave him some tips to sound less like ai which is funny because we train ai with rlhf to sound more and more like humans.
I've heard some students are concerned that any text submitted to an AI-detector is automatically added to training sets and therefore will eventually will be flagged as AI.
The article demonstrates that good, simple prose is being flagged as AI-generated. Reminds me of a misguided junior high English teacher that half-heartedly claimed I was a plagiarist for including the word "masterfully" in an essay, when she knew I was too stupid to use a word like that. These tools are industrializing that attitude and rolling it to teachers that otherwise wouldn't feel that way.
> she knew I was too stupid to use a word like that.
Oh... It is the story of my school math education. I always got bad marks, because I was "too stupid to come up with this particular solution to the problem". I didn't thought it was really unfair, because I thought myself to be lazy, and I looked for such solutions to math problems that would minimize my work. Oftentimes I ignored textbook ways to solve problems and used my own. I believed that it was a cheating, so naturally I got worse marks, but I put up with that, because I was lazy to do it in more complex way from a textbook.
That would be a pretty sad outcome. In my high school we did both in-class essays and homework essays. The former were always more poorly developed and more more poorly written. IMO students still deserve practice doing something that takes more than 45 minutes.
You mean model collapse, because schoolchildren will soon base their writing on the awful AI slop they have read online? That's fearsome, actually.
We are seeing this with Grammarly already, where instead of a nuance Grammarly picks the beige alternative. The forerunner was the Plain English Campaign, which succeeded in official documents publicised in imprecise language at primary school reading level, it's awful.
The challenging thing is, cheating students also say they're being falsely accused. Tough times in academia right now. Cheating became free, simple, and ubiquitous overnight. Cheating services built on top of ChatGPT advertise to college students; Chrome extensions exist that just solve your homework for you.
I don’t know how to break this to you, but cheating was always free, simple, and ubiquitous. Sure, ChatGPT wouldn’t write your paper; but your buddy who needed his math problem solved would. Or find a paper on countless sites on the Internet.
That's just not so. Most profs were in school years before the internet was ubiquitous. And asking a friend to do your work for you is simple, but far from free.
Depends on what you’re exchanging. If you’re exceptional at math (and even find it fun) and the exchange is a math problem set, that’s almost like getting paid for cheating, in a sense.
This has nothing to do with AI, but rather about proof. If a teacher said to a student you cheated and the student disputes it. Then in front of the dean or whatever the teacher can produce no proof of course the student would be absolved. Why is some random tool (AI or not) saying they cheated without proof suddenly taken as truth?
The AI tool report shown to the dean with "85% match" Will be used as "proof".
If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
I think what you pointed out is exactly the problem. Administrators apparently don’t understand statistics and therefore can’t be trusted to utilize the outputs of statistical tools correctly.
> If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
And ChatGPT will happily argue whichever side you want to take. I just passed it a review I wrote a few years ago (with no AI/LLM or similar assistance), with the prompts "Prove that this was written by an AI/LLM: <review>" and "Prove that this was written by a human, not an AI/LLM: <review>", and got the following two conclusions:
> Without metadata or direct evidence, it is impossible to definitively prove this was written by an AI. However, based on the characteristics listed, there are signs that it might have been generated or significantly assisted by an AI.[1]
> While AI models like myself are capable of generating complex and well-written content, this specific review shows several hallmarks of human authorship, including nuanced critique, emotional depth, personalized anecdotes, and culturally specific references. Without external metadata or more concrete proof, it’s not possible to definitively claim this was written by a human, but the characteristics strongly suggest that it was.[2]
For an assignment completed at home, on a student's device using software of a student's choosing, there can essentially be no proof. If the situation you describe becomes common, it might make sense for a school to invest into a web-based text editor that capture keystrokes and user state and requiring students use that for at-home text-based assignments.
That or eliminating take-home writing assignments--we had plenty of in-class writing when I went to school.
>For an assignment completed at home, on a student's device using software of a student's choosing, there can essentially be no proof
According to an undergraduate student who babysits for our child, some students are literally screen recording the entire writing process, or even recording themselves writing at their computers as a defense against claims of using AI. I don't know how effective that defense is in practice.
I've been going for a comp sci degree for the fun of it lately (never had the chance out of high school) and I've done this for different courses. Typically for big items like course final projects or for assignments it's mentioned are particularly difficult/high stakes.
That will be a dystopia. If I were a student still, I would rather go to the university physically, than install spyware on my computer, that only incidentally reports to the university, but its main purpose will be collecting my personal data for some greedy commercial business. No thank you.
That, or the uni shall give me a separate machine to write on, only for that purpose.
> I would rather go to the university physically, than install spyware on my computer
Well yes, in-person proctored is the gold standard. For those who can’t or won’t go in person, something invasive is really the only alternative to entirely exam-based scoring.
If the university requires invasive technology, then it should of course provide their students with devices, onto which they can put their invasive stuff.
Source? I was accused of a couple things (not plagiarism) at my university and was absolutely allowed to present a case, and due to a lack of evidence it was tossed and never spoken of again.
So no, you don’t exactly get a trial by a jury of your peers, but it isn’t like they are averse to evidence being presented.
This evidence would be fairly trivial to refute, but I agree it is a burden no student needs or wants.
A kid living in a wealthy Boston suburb used AI for his essay (that much is not in doubt) and the family is now suing the district because the school objected and his chances of getting into a good finishing school have dropped.
On the other hand you have students attending abusive online universities who are flagged by their plagiarism detector and they wouldn't ever think of availing themselves of the law. US law is for the rich, the purpose of a system is what it does.
I’m not sure what “used AI” means here, and the article is unclear, but it sure does sound like he did have it write it for him, and his parents are trying to “save his college admissions” by trying to say “it doesn’t say anywhere that having AI write it is bad, just having other people write it,” which is a specious argument at best. But again: gleaned from a crappy article.
You don’t need to be rich to change the law. You do need to be determined, and most people don’t have or want to spend the time.
Literally none of that changes the fact that the Universities are not, themselves, the law.
The law is unevenly enforced. My wife is currently dealing with a disruptive student from a wealthy family background. It's a chemistry class, you can't endanger your fellow students. Ordinarily, one would throw the kid out of the course, but there would be pushback from the family, and so she is cautious, let's deduct a handful of points, maybe she gets it, and thus it continues.
You can't divorce the law that's on the books from the organs that enforce it. Any legal theorist will tell you that. Any lawyer will tell you that, and if you were ever involved in serious litigation you know.
Apologies if that’s how it came off, but that wasn’t what I was trying to say. Of course, in the moment the law is enforced, the enforcer “is the law.” That is true for any law, at any time, but it is not literally true. Enforcing a law unfairly can be (and often is) prosecuted as a crime, and gets either new laws passed or existing laws changed.
But that they can be sued in a court of law is actually a very big deal; it is the defining thing that makes them not the law.
A reminder of what I was responding to: “They issue the claim, the judgement and the penalty. And there is nothing you can do about it. Why? Because they are the law.”
That is plainly untrue. There is something you can do about it. You can sue them, precisely because they are not the law.
That could take months of nervous waiting and who-knows how many wasted hours researching, talking and writing letters. The same reason most people don't return a broken $11 pot, it's cheaper and easier to just adapt and move around the problem (get a new pot) rather than fixing it by returning and "fighting" for a refund.
Police enforce the law. We aren’t discussing police; we are discussing universities. Some have their own police departments, but even those are beholden to the law, which is not the university’s to define.
I hope many more will take them to court, so that they learn a lesson or two, about blindly trusting some proprietary AI tool and accusing without proof. They should learn to hold themselves to higher standards, if they want any future in academics.
Aren't they exactly making it because their customers are not checking it and still buy it probably for very decent money. And always remember buyers are not end users, either the teachers or students, but the administrators. And for them showing doing something about risk of AI is more important than actually doing anything about it.
The companies selling these aren’t “spending so much developing the technology”. They’re following the same playbook as snake oil salesmen and people huckstering supplements online do: minimum effort into the product, maximum effort into marketing it.
Seems like the easy fix here is move all evaluation in-class. Are schools really that reliant on internet/computer based assignments? Actually, this could be a great opportunity to dial back unnecessary and wasteful edu-tech creep.
Out of class evaluations doesn't mean electronic. It could be problem sets, essays, longer-form things like projects. All of these things are difficult to do in a limited time window.
These limited time-window assessments are also (a) artificial (don't always reflect how the person might use their knowledge later) (b) stressful (some people work better/worse with a clock ticking) and (c) subject to more variability due to the time pressure (what if you're a bit sick, or have had a bad day or are just tired during the time window?).
It could also be hybrid, with an out-of-class and an in-class components. There could even be multiple steps, with in-class components aimed at both verifying authorship and providing feedback in an iterative process.
AI makes it impossible to rely on out-of-class assignments to evaluate the kids' knowledge. How we respond to that is unclear, but relying on cheating detectors is not going to work.
The only longterm solution that makes sense is to allow students to use AI tools and to require a log provided by the AI tool to be provided. Adjust the assignment accordingly and use custom system prompts for the AI tools so that the students are both learning about the underlying subject and also learning how to effectively use AI tools.
That overall would be the right thing. Homework is such a weird concept when you think about it. Especially if you get graded on the correctness. There is no step between the teacher explaining and you validating whether you understood the material.
Teacher explains material, you get homework about the material and are graded on it.
It shouldn't be like that. If the work (i.e. the exercises) are important to grasp the material, they should be done in class.
> If the work (i.e. the exercises) are important to grasp the material, they should be done in class.
I'd like to offer what I've come to realize about the concept of homework. There are two main benefits to it: [1] it could help drill in what you learned during the lecture and [2] it could be the "boring" prep work that would allow teachers to deliver maximum value in the classroom experience.
Learning simply can't be confined in the classroom. GP suggestion would be, in my view, detrimental for students.
[1] can be done in class but I don't think it should be. A lot of students already lack the motivation to learn the material by themselves and hence need the space to make mistakes and wrap their heads around the concept. A good instructor can explain any topic (calculus, loops and recursion, human anatomy) well and make the demonstration look effortless. It doesn't mean, however, that the students have fully mastered the concept after watching someone do it really well. You only start to learn it once you've fluffed through all the pitfalls at least mostly on your own.
[2] can't be done in class, obviously. You want your piano teacher to teach you rhythm and musical phrasing, hence you better come to class already having mastered notation and the keyboard and with the requisite digital dexterity to perform. You want your coach to focus on the technical aspects of your game, focus on drilling you tactics; you don't want him having to pace you through conditioning exercises---that would be a waste of his expertise. We can better discuss Hamlet if we've all read the material and have a basic idea of the plot and the characters' motivations.
That said, it might make sense to simply not grade homeworks. After all, it's the space for students to fail. Unfortunately, if it weren't graded, a lot of students will just skip it.
Ultimately, it's a question of behavior, motivation, and incentives. I agree that the current system, even pre-AI, could only barely live up to ideals [1] and [2] but I don't have any better system in mind either, unfortunately.
> you don't want him having to pace you through conditioning exercises---that would be a waste of his expertise
I fundamentally disagree - I vividly remember, many times during homework in maths for example, I realised that I am stuck and so don’t understand something explained earlier, and I need to ask someone. For me, my parents were able to help. But later in Highschool, when you get to differential equations - they no longer can. And obviously if your parents are poorly educated they can’t rather.
Second point, there is no feedback loop this way - a teacher should see how difficult is his homework, how much time students spend on it, and why they are struggling. Marking a piece of paper does not do it. There was wild inconsistency between teachers for how much homework they would set and how long they thought it would take students.
Lastly, the school + homework should be able to accommodate tag the required learning within 1 working day. It is anyway a form of childcare while parents work
> Homework is such a weird concept when you think about it.
It’s not when you reframe it in Puritanical terms. Keep the children busy for 12 hours per day: If they get some practice on their courses, great, but busy, quiet children won’t fall in with the devil.
I wish I could get a refund on all the wasted childhood I spent doing useless homework on subjects I have not used since. No, it didn’t make me “a well-rounded person,” it just detracted from the time I could spend learning about computers—a subject my school could not teach me.
Yep. The solutions which actually benefit education are never expensive, but require higher quality teachers with less centralized control:
- placing less emphasis on numerical grades to disincentive cheating (hard to measure success)
- open response written questions (harder to teach, harder to grade)
- reading books (hard to determine if students actually did it)
- proof based math (hard to teach)
Instead we keep imagining more absurd surveillance systems “what if we can track student eyes to make sure they actually read the paragraph”
totally agree. More time spent questionning the students about their work would make AI detection useless...
but somehow, we don't trust teacher anymore. Those in power want to check that the teacher actually makes his job so they want to see wome written, reviewable proof... So the grades are there both to control the student and the teacher. WWW (What a wonderful world).
Moving everything in class seems like a good idea in theory. But in practice, kids need more time than 50 minutes of class time (assuming no lecture) to work on problems. Sometimes you will get stuck on 1 homework question for hours. If a student is actively working on something, yanking them away from their curiosity seems like the wrong thing to do.
On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It's a hard call: teach to the cheaters or teach to the good kids?
I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade. I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams. Hopefully that removes the incentive to cheat. If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.
(Even with homework worth little, I still get copy-pasted ChatGPT answers on homework by some students... the ones that did poorly on the exams...)
> If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.
I'd be cautious about that, because it means the kids with undiagnosed ADHD who are functionally incapable of studying without enforced assignments will just completely crash and burn without absorbing any of the material at all.
Or, at least, that's what happened to me in the one and only pre-college class I ever had where "all work is self-study and only the tests count" was the rule.
I completed college with unmanaged ADHD (diagnosed 10 years later; worst result my psych had ever seen on the TOVA lol).
My second and third semesters went exactly as you described for courses where I was exposed to new things and wasn't just repeating high school - mainly because I had no training or coping mechanisms for learning under that type of pedagogy.
After getting my ass kicked in exams and failing a class for the first time in my life, I finally grokked that optional homework assignments were the professor's way of communicating learning milestones to us, and that even though the professor said they weren't graded (unless you asked), you still had to do them or you wouldn't learn the material well enough to pass the exam.
Still had a few bad grades because of the shit foundation I built for myself, but I brought a 2.2 GPA up to a 3.3 by the end.
The point is that it takes is exposure to that style of teaching before it can really be effective.
> I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade.
I feel like this is almost exactly moving all evaluation into the class. If "little" becomes nothing, it is exactly that.
I feel this was always the best strategy. In college, how much homework assignments were worth was an easy way to evaluate how bad the teacher was and how lightweight the class was going to be. My best professors dared you not to do your homework, and would congratulate you if you could pass their exams without having done it.
The very best ones didn't even want you to turn it in, they'd only assign problems that had answers in the back of the book. Why put you through a entire compile cycle of turning it in, having a TA go over it, and getting it back when you were supposed to be onto the next thing? Better and cheaper to find out you're wrong quickly.
I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams.
When I did A levels and my first undergraduate degree (in the UK) that's how it worked. The only measurements used to calculate my A level grades and degree class were:
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of high school)
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of university)
Minor quibble here: If a student gets stuck on a single homework problem for hours, they're probably hopelessly lost and would benefit from being interrupted. That or the problem is way too broad to be mere homework.
There are more students than ever, and lots of schools now offer remote programs, or just remote options in general for students, to accommodate for the increased demand.
There's little political will to revert to the old ways, as it would drive up the costs. You need more space and you need more workers.
My daughter was accused of turning in an essay written by AI because the school software at her online school said so. Her mom watched her write the essay. I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI. Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.
Imagine how little common knowledge there will be one or two generations down the road after people decide they no longer need general thinking skills, just as they've already decided calculators free them from having to care about arithmetic skills.
At least the first 2 are far more accurate than humans ever could be. The third, i.e. trusting others to vet and find the correct information, is the problem.
Why? We've done it for ages, most trust in Wikipedia, and before most trusted in encyclopedias. Books written by others have been used forever. We just shift where we place the trust over time.
I just googled ‘do I need a license to drive a power boat in UK’
I got AI answer saying ‘no’, but actually you do.
If I use a calculator it will be correct. If I open encyclopaedia it will mostly be correct, because someone with a brain did at least 5 minutes of thining.
We are not talking about some minor detail, AI makes colossal errors with great confidence and conviction.
But you're comparing apples to oranges anyway... a mathematical problem is vastly different than a q&a problem - which of course involves language which is anyway a lossy form of communication.
GPS is great at knowing where you are, but directions are much much harder, and the extra difficulty is why the first version of Apple Maps was widely ridiculed.
Even now, I find it's a mistake to just assume Google Maps can direct me around Berlin public transport better than my own local knowledge — sometimes it can, sometimes it can't.
(But yes, a single original Pi Zero beats all humans combined at arithmetic even if all of us were at the level of the world record holder).
When I visit a new city I trust google maps more than I trust myself with a paper map, it even knows all public transport routes and times, and can guide me through connecting different types of public transports (e.g.: bus + train) to get to my destination quicker/cheaper, that would take me and a paper map quite a bit longer to plan.
After I moved here and learned the system, I realised it had on my first trip directed me through a series of unnecessary train routes for a 5 minute walk.
Last summer, when trying to find a specific named cafe a friend was at, Google Maps tried to have me walk 5 minutes to the train station behind me to catch the train to the stop in front of me to walk back to… the other side of the street because I hadn't recognised the sign.
It's a great tool, fantastic even, but it still doesn't beat local knowledge. And very occasionally, invisibly unless you hit the edge, the map isn't correctly joined at the nodes and you can spot the mistake even as a first time visitor.
> trusting others to vet and find the correct information, is the problem
To be honest, we do for most things: I have not checked the speed of light. And I surely would not be able to implement a way to measure it from only my observations and experience.
It's more insidious than that. AI will be used as a liability shield/scapegoat, so will become more prevalent in the workplace. So in order to not be homeless, more people will be forced to turn their brains off.
And yet, this fear is timeless; back when book printing was big, people were fearmongering that people would no longer memorize things but rely too much on books. But in hindsight it ended up becoming a force multiplier.
I mean I'm skeptical about AI as well and don't like it, but I can see it becoming a force multiplier itself.
> people were fearmongering that people would no longer memorize things but rely too much on books...
Posters here love to bring out this argument, but I think a major weakness is that those people wound up being right. People don't memorize things any more! I don't think it's fair to hold out as an example of fears which didn't come to pass, as they very much did come to pass.
AI does have things it does consistently wrong. Especially if you don't narrow down what it's allowed to grab from.
The easiest for someone here to see is probably code generation. You can point at parts of it and go "this part is from a high-school level tutorial", "this looks like it was grabbed from college assignments", and "this is following 'clean code' rules in silly places"(like assuming a vector might need to be Nd, instead of just 3D).
The education system in the US is broadly staffed by the dumbest people from every walk of life.
If they could make it elsewhere, they would.
I don’t expect this to be a popular take here, and most replies will be NAXALT fallacies, but in aggregate it’s the truth. Sorry, your retired CEO physics teacher who you loved was not a representative sample.
It's not just USA, it's pretty much universal, as much as I've seen it. People like to pretend like it's some sort of noble profession, but I vividly remember having a conversation with recently graduated ex-classmates, where one of them was complaining that she failed to pass at every department she applied to, so she has no other choice than to apply for department of education (I guess? I don't know what is the name of the American equivalent of that thing: bachelor-level program for people who are going to be teachers). At that moment I felt suddenly validated in all my complaints about the system we just passed through.
I went to public schools in middle class neighborhoods in California from the late sixties to the early eighties. My teachers were largely excellent. I think that was due to cultural and economic factors - teaching was considered a profession for idealistic folks to go into at the time and the spread between rich and poor was less dramatic in the 50s and 60s (when my teachers were deciding their professions). So the culture made it attractive and economics made it possible. Another critical thing we seem to have lost.
What I take from this is that you dont like reading about history much, with clear exception of overly optimistic religious texts. The religious vocation frequently got you into pretty abusive situation and the #1 expectation was "obeisance". That was what you was supposed to do, primary. Not exactly what person you are responding to is writing about.
Moreover, women never needed to start out as teachers to "be ready for childcare". The childcare expectations were much lower at the time, but amount of chores at home massively higher.
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. We educate everyone to be the smartest person in the class, and then we don't have jobs for them. And then we complain that education is not good enough. Shouldn't we conclude that education is already a bit too good?
And yet a staggering percentage of them are incompetent (both in their subject and as educators generally).
"and then a bunch" is somewhat misleading. They in fact take easier and fewer classes in the subjects that they are studying for, but they have to take extra classes on education, which afaik are not that hard to pass. Getting a "Lehramt" degree is much easier than getting the regular degree in a subject, which is why many people that are simply not good enough for the real thing do it.
Also we have a teacher shortage and more and more teachers are not in fact people that received an education you usually have to get as a teacher, but are just regular people with either a degree in the subject they are teaching or a degree in almost anything (depends on how desperate the schools are and what subjects they are hiring for).
Let's test your skills as a plagiarism detector. Below are two paragraphs. One of them was written by an LLM, one by a human. I have only altered whitespace in order to make them scan the same. Can you tell which is which? How much would you bet that you are correct?
A.
The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels
as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain
parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more
thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished
whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight.
They were pure works of art.
B.
The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels
as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain
parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more
thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished
whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight.
They were pure works of art.
Unfortunately the essays of your students can not be found on gutenberg.org. You have to try evaluating only the text and it's context to guess what's LLM-generated.
I expect there will be some legal disputes over this kind of thing pretty soon. As another comment pointed out: run the AI-detection software on essays from before ChatGPT was a thing to see how accurate these are. There's also the problem of autists having their essays flagged disproportionately, so you're potentially looking at some sort of civil rights violation.
> I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI.
I think it is, however the dream among educators of an “AI detector” is so strong that they’re willing to believe “these guys are the ones that cracked the problem” over and over, when it’s not entirely true. They try it out themselves with some simple attempts and find that it mostly works and conclude the company’s claims are true. The problem though is that their tests are all trying to pass off AI-generated work as human-generated—not the other way around. Since these tools have a non-zero false positive rate, there will always exist some poor kid who slaved away on a 20-page term paper for weeks that gets popped for using AI. That kid has no recourse, no appeals—the school spent a lot of money on the AI detector, and you better believe that it’s right.
>> Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.
This is what will eventually happen. Some component or provider deep in the stack will provide some answer and organizations will be sufficiently shrouded from hard decisions and be able to easily point to "the system."
This happens all the time in the US. Addresses are changed randomly because some address verification system feedback was accepted w/o account owner approval -- call customer service and they say "the system said that your address isnt right", as if the system knows where i've been living for the past 5yrs better than me, better than the DMV, better than the deed on my house. If the error rate is low enough, people just accept it in the US.
Then, it gets worse. Perhaps the error rate isnt low, just that it is high for a sub-group. Then you get to see how you rank in society. Ask brown people in 2003-2006 how fun it was to fly. If you have the wrong last name and zipcode combo in NYC suddenly you arent allowed to rent citibikes despite it operating on public land.
The same will happen with this, unless there is some massive ACLU lawsuit which exposes and the damages will continue until there is a resolution. Quite possibly subtle features on language style will get used as triggers, probably unknowingly. People in the "in-group" who arent exposed will claim it is a fair system while others will be forced to defend themselves and have to provide the burden of proof on a blackbox.
I suspect there is a product opportunity here. It could be as simple as a chrome extension that records your sessions in google docs and generates a timelapse of your writing process. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to fake and could convince an accuser that you really did write the essay. At the very least it could be useful insurance in case you’re accused.
The article mentions 'responsible' grammarly usage, which I think is an oxymoron in an undergraduate or high school setting. Undergrad and high school is where you learn to write coherently. Grammarly is a tool that actively works against that goal because it doesn't train students to fix the grammatical mistakes, it just fixes it for them and they become steadily worse (and less detail oriented) writers.
I have absolutely no problem using it in a more advanced field where the basics are already done and the focus is on research, for example, but at lower levels I'd likely consider it dishonest.
>It doesn’t cause her to be any less attentive to her writing; it just makes it possible to write.
I was not really referring to accommodations under the ADA. For people that do not require accommodations, the use of them is unfair to their classmates and can be detrimental to their ability to perform without them in the future, as there is no requirement to have the accommodations available to them. This is not the case for someone with dyslexia.
Fair, I can see why it looks like I confused them. I was solely using her an example; my point is that grammarly hasn’t caused her knowledge of grammar to get worse, only better. It has taught her over time.
An alternative idea could be to use some software that does speech to text. Not sure there are any easy to setup local options. I tried one a while ago, but not really investing much time into it, like some people do, who program using such a setup. The result was very underwhelming. Punctuation worked badly and capitalization of words also was non-existent, which of course would be a no-go for writing research papers.
So if anyone knows a good tool, that is flexible enough to support proper writing and able to run locally on a machine, hints appreciated.
My kids’ school added a new weapons scanner as kids walk in the door. It’s powered by “AI.” They trust the AI quite a bit.
However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner.
I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting them to do the things they want them to do, but don’t work.
The point was that if the laptop is taken out and doesn’t go through the scanner, but the rest of the student has to go through the scanner, then the laptop is a great hiding place. Presumably that scanner can at least beep at a pocket knife.
Not the OP, but obviously it wasn't a metal detector, otherwise it would've detected all brands of laptops as weapons. It's probably an image based detector.
The problem is, if it has been that badly tested that it detects Lenovo laptops as weapons, there is a good chance that it doesn't properly detect actual weapons either.
Guns are legal in almost every country - I think your problem is with countries that have almost no restriction on gun ownership. e.g. Here in the UK you can legally own a properly licensed rifle or shotgun and even a handgun in some places outside of Great Britain (e.g. Northern Ireland).
Just because something is technically legal, doesn't mean it's in any way common or part of UK culture to own a gun.
There hasn't been a school shooting in the UK for nearly 30 years. Handguns were banned after the last school shooting and there hasn't been one since.
There's already a UK ban on carrying knives in public unless you have an occupational need and they're wrapped up or at least not just sitting in your pocket.
Licensing wouldn't be worthwhile as almost every household would want knives for food preparation.
That is why I said that, as the comparison is pretty weak. The US' gun problem basically wouldn't be a topic of discussion if it was occurring at the rate mass stabbings do in the UK.
Exactly. It's not the legality of weapons, but the easy availability of them that causes the issues.
It seems to me like victim blaming for U.S. schools to have active shooter drills - it makes more sense to have much better training and screening of gun owners than trying to train the victims. However, given that the NRA is excessively powerful in U.S. politics, I can see why they are necessary, but it just seems easier to me to stop kids from being able to get hold of guns (e.g. have some rudimentary screening for gun purchases and require owners to keep them in locked cabinets when they are not in use).
Why do people say such unsubstantiated nonsense. Places with guns have more death. And it's obvious to see why guns are a tool for for killing, and they're pretty effective.
correct however the simple existence of a weapon does not automatically mean killing. Other factors exists like the obvious rampant poverty and mental illness which gets ignored because it's not as easy to solve and political polarizing than simply banning something.
If the US were a functional democracy, and continued letting unrestricted gun ownership be legal, you could argue that the US citizenry is being stupid. But the US is not a functional democracy, and meaningfully reforming anything is impossible, regardless of whether most people want it or whether it’s a good idea.
A high school I worked at had a similar system in place called Evolv. It’s not a metal detector, but it did successfully catch a student with a loaded gun in his backpack. Granted, he didn’t mean to bring the gun to school. I think it’s stupid to believe that kids who want to bring a gun to school will arrive on time to school. They often arrive late when security procedures like bag scanning are not in place.
It's stupid to bring yourself into a position where scanning kids for weapons is necessary. In this case we're already past that, so the stupidity is that the device isn't updated to not identify laptops as weapons. If that's not possible, then device is a mislabeled laptop detector.
Or it is accepted that said purchase will cover their ass, or even better, that refusing said purchase can be held against them in the future if things happen, even if said purchase would have made 0 difference.
I wonder if it's batteries, they look quite close to explosives on a variety of scanning tools. In fact, both chemically store and release energy but on extremely different timescales.
I'm genuinely curious what you meant! I can totally understand those who say schools are like prisons. I've never encountered the inversion of that idea.
How do you suggest we reduce the prevalence of guns / improve gun control in the US? Keep in mind that the US is not a functioning democracy and its political system is structured to allow any side to block any substantial reform.
Are you answering your own question? I read your reply as :
"How do we stop Z? X and Y are the cause of Z.
The thing is, I said gun control, but I'm not even sure that's real issue. I kinda took it backward. There are mass shootings because of the ease of access to guns, but it's not the ease of access to guns that pushes people to this.
In other ords, remove the guns, the mechanisms that drive people to think they want to kill remains. I might be wrong but it feels like in Europe there are more and more cold weapons attacks, or the use of ramming trucks.
Any at all? I don't think Americans realize how much of a US-only problem it is, and how some of the non-US mass shootings are explicitly inspired by US media and discourse.
Rather than trying to diminish something that's completely preventable and abhorrent maybe we could discuss ways to actually prevent it. Because this isn't a problem anywhere else so clearly it's preventable.
If AI can be part of a solution here this is a reasonable place to discuss it.
Nobody said we shouldn't try to solve the problem. But the first step is accurately describing the problem to be solved. Something that occurs once a year across the entire country has very different solutions than something which occurs once a week in every county.
More than once a week is regularly. Doesn't matter how wide the geographical area is - ANY school in the USA might be next, so they ALL have to take precautions.
I had the same line of thought as I am not following the topic and media hype can make an elephant out of a mouse.
But based on this 2022 statistics USA really has a thing going on with school shootings... more than a hundred per year is way too much. I would definitely consider it "regularly" even if it seems a low number statistically (50 million students === 1 shooter / 500000 student ~?~ 1 shooting / 1000 school).
This is what we really need AI regulation for. The accuracy rates should be advertised in a standard format like a nutritional label. People purchasing the systems on public dollars should be required to define a good plan for false positives and negatives that handles the expected rates based on the advertised precision and recall.
Rather than flagging it as AI why don’t we flag if it’s good or not?
I work with people in their 30s That cannot write their way out of a hat. Who cares if the work is AI assisted or not. Most AI writing is super dry, formulaic and bad. The student doesn’t recognize this the give them a poor mark for having terrible style.
Because sometimes an exercise is supposed to be done under conditions that don’t represent the real world. If an exam is without calculator, you can’t just use a calculator anyways because you’re going to have one when working, too. If the assignment is „write a text about XYZ, without using AI assistance“, using an AI is cheating. Cheating should have worse consequences than writing bad stuff yourself, so detecting AI (or just not having assignments to do unsupervised) is still important.
Because often goal of assessing student is not that they can generate output. It is to ensure they have retained sufficient amount of knowledge they are supposed to retain from course and be able regurgitate it in sufficiently readable format.
Actually being able to generate good text is entirely separate evaluation. And AI might have place there.
Traditional school work has rewarded exactly the formulaic dry ChatGPT language, while the free thinking, explorative and creative writing that humans excel at is at best ignored, more commonly marked down for irrelevant typos and lack of the expected structure and too much personality showing through.
Because judging the quality of "free thinking" outside of STEM is incredibly biased and subjective on the person doing the judging and could even get you in trouble for wrong think (try debating the Israel vs Palestine issue and see), which is why many school systems have converged on standardized boiler plate slop that's easy to judge by people with average intellect and training, and most importantly, easy to game by students so that it's less discriminatory on race, religion and socio economic backgrounds.
Most of the ChatGPT type systems have a rather blah default style. That's what you learn as a non-native speaker of the language. Thus the problem for people who learned English from textbooks.
Amusingly, you can push ChatGPT type systems into other styles of writing.
I put in the preamble to the US constitution and asked for different styles:
Modern:
We, the people of the United States, come together to build a stronger, more united country. We want to create fairness for everyone, keep peace at home, ensure our safety, support each other’s well-being, and protect our freedoms for ourselves and future generations. This is why we are establishing this Constitution for the United States.
Gun nut:
We the People of the United States, rallying together to create a stronger, more unified nation, are all about upholding justice, keeping the peace at home, and defending our rights. We’re here to support one another, ensure our freedoms, and safeguard the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations. That’s why we’re putting this Constitution in place for the United States of America—because we believe in freedom, security, and our right to bear arms!
Woke:
We, the people of the United States, are coming together to create a more inclusive and equitable society. Our goal is to establish justice for all, promote peace within our communities, ensure safety for everyone, and uplift the well-being of every individual. We are committed to protecting our freedoms and rights, not just for ourselves, but for future generations. This is why we are enacting this Constitution for the United States of America, to foster a nation that values diversity, equality, and the dignity of all.
Christian:
We, the people of the United States, gather together in faith and unity to build a more perfect nation under God. Our purpose is to establish justice and promote peace in our homes and communities. We strive to protect our common security and care for one another’s well-being, guided by the principles of love and compassion. In doing so, we seek to uphold the blessings of liberty that God has granted us, not just for ourselves, but for future generations. This is why we commit to this Constitution for the United States of America, as we seek to honor His will in all that we do.
If you're having trouble with essays being detected as AI, you can run them through an LLM to rewrite them in a different tone.
We, the people of the United States, unite to forge a more harmonious society, guided by the principles of collective strength and shared responsibility. Our aim is to establish justice and maintain social stability, ensuring the well-being of all citizens through solidarity and mutual support. By safeguarding our national defense and promoting the common welfare, we embody the spirit of unity and progress. This commitment to our foundational values is why we establish this Constitution for the United States of America, as we work toward a prosperous future for all.
MAGA:
We, the great people of the United States, are coming together to create a stronger, more united nation. Our mission is to establish true justice, ensure peace in our communities, and defend our country with pride. We’re all about promoting the well-being of hard-working Americans and securing our freedoms for ourselves and future generations. That’s why we’re affirming this Constitution for the United States of America—because we believe in making our nation great and preserving our rights for all!
Martin Luther King:
We, the people of the United States, come together in a spirit of unity and purpose, striving to create a more perfect union. It is our sacred duty to establish justice and ensure tranquility in our communities, uplifting one another in love and understanding. We must provide for the common defense and promote the welfare of all, recognizing that true freedom is a collective journey. In this endeavor, we seek to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations. Therefore, we affirm this Constitution for the United States of America as a testament to our commitment to equality, justice, and the enduring hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Trump:
We, the amazing people of the United States, are coming together to build a tremendous nation, folks. Our goal? To create a more perfect union—believe me, it’s going to be fantastic! We’re establishing real justice, keeping our communities safe, and defending our great country. We’re promoting the welfare of all hardworking Americans and securing our incredible freedoms for ourselves and our future generations. That’s why we’re putting this Constitution in place for the United States of America—because we’re making America great again, and nobody does it better!
This is not something that reveals how bad AI is or how dumb administration is. It's revealing how fundamentally dumb our educational system is. It's incredibly easy to subvert. And kids don't find value in it.
Helping kids find value in education is the only important concern here and adding an AI checker doesn't help with that.
> Helping kids find value in education is the only important concern here and adding an AI checker doesn't help with that.
Exactly. It also does the complete opposite. It teaches kids from fairly early on that their falsely flagged texts might as well be just written with AI, further discouraging them from improving their writing skills. Which are still just as useful with AI or not.
I'm returning to complete a single class: the writing requirement. It's not that bad. You just run your paper through a 3rd party AI checker beforehand and then cross your fingers and hit submit. You're probably at lower risk than people who don't check. You don't have to outrun the bear, just your fellow students.
Good point. What I am curious about is how the noted "AI Humanizer" software sites like Hix Bypass work to defeat classification as having being written by AI.
The problem is that professors want a test with high sensitivity and students want a test with high specificity and only one of them is in charge of choosing and administering the test. It's a moral hazard.
No. Professors want students that don’t cheat so they never have to worry about it.
This is an ethics problem (people willing to cheat), this is a multi cultural problem (different expectations of what constitutes cheating) this is an incentive problem (credentialism makes cheating worth it).
Those are hard problems. So a little tech that might scare students and give the professor a feeling of control is a band aid.
That's kinda nuts how adult people learned to trust some random algorithms in a year or two. They don't know how it works, they cannot explain it, they don't care, it just works. It's magic. If it says you cheated, you cheated. You cannot do anything about it.
I want to emphasize, that this isn't really about trusting magic, it's about people nonchalantly doing ridiculous stuff nowdays and that they aren't held accountable for that, apparently. For example, there were times back at school when I was "accused" of cheating, because it was the only time when I liked the homework at some class and took it seriously, and it was kinda insulting to hear that there's absolutely no way I did it, but I still got my mark, because it doesn't matter what she thinks if she cannot prove it, so please just sign it and fuck off, it's the last time I'm doing my homework at your class anyway.
On the contrary, if this article to be believed, these teachers don't have to prove anything, the fact that a coin flipped heads is considered enough of a proof. And everyone supposedly treats it as if it's ok. "Well, they have this system at school, what can we do!" It's crazy.
That's how you can mold society as you like at your level: this student's older sibling was a menace? Let's fuck them over, being shitty must run in the family. You don't like the race / gender / sexuality of a student? Now "chatGPT" can give you an easy way to make their school life harder.
I agree. But now some people can point to ChatGPT or other tools and use it as an excuse. So for them, the "bugs" are a feature. They don't care about false positives, they care about the fact some authority tells them a student they don't like used AI to write an essay.
> They don't know how it works, they cannot explain it, they don't care, it just works. It's magic. If it says you cheated, you cheated. You cannot do anything about it.
People trust a system because other people trust a system.
It does not matter if the system is the inquisition looking for witches, machine or Gulag from USSR.
The system said you are guilty. The system can’t be wrong.
Someone here at HN made a great observation about this. The problem with neural networks and their generated output is that they are programs, running on the computers. We have been training humans for more than three decade that computers are producing precise, correct and reproducible outputs. And now these NN corporations have created a random symbol generators, and they actively hide the fact that there is programmed randomness in their programs.
There was recent article about yet another generated text in the US court, this time without malicious intent (it seems). The article boils down to the fact that the plaintiff asked neural network to do a historical financial calculation of property cost and immediately trusted it, "because computers". Computers are always correct, NNs run on computers, hence they are always correct :) . Soon this mentality will be in every household on the planet. We will be remembering days of media dishonesty and propaganda with fondness, at least previously we kinda could discern if the source was intentionally lying.
> That's kinda nuts how adult people learned to trust some random algorithms in a year or two. They don't know how it works, they cannot explain it, they don't care, it just works. It's magic.
Well, you shouldn’t be so surprised. You just described 95%+ of the population’s approach to any form of technology. And there’s very rarely any discomfort with such ignorance, nor any desire to learn even the basics. It’s very hard to understand for me — some of us just have to know!
Are any students coming up with a process to prove their innocents when they get falsely accused?
If I was still in school I would write my docs in a Google Doc which provides the edit history. I could potentially also record video of me typing the entire document as well or screen recording my screen.
“After her work was flagged, Olmsted says she became obsessive about avoiding another accusation. She screen-recorded herself on her laptop doing writing assignments. She worked in Google Docs to track her changes and create a digital paper trail. She even tried to tweak her vocabulary and syntax. “I am very nervous that I would get this far and run into another AI accusation,” says Olmsted, who is on target to graduate in the spring. “I have so much to lose.”
I don't think there's any real way around the fundamental flaw of such systems assuming there's an accurate way to detect generated text, since even motivated cheaters could use their phone to generate the text and just iterate edits from there, using identical CYA techniques.
That said, I'd imagine if someone resorts to using generative text their edits would contain anomalies that someone legitimately writing wouldn't have in terms of building out the structure/drafts. Perhaps that in itself could be auto detected more reliably.
All of that still wouldn't prove that you didn't use any sorta LLM to get it done. The professor could just claim you used ChatGPT on your phone and typed the thing in, then changed it up a bit.
We should have some sort of time constrained form of assessment in a controlled environment, free from access to machines, so we can put these students under some kind of thorough examination.
(“Thorough examination” as a term is too long though — let’s just call them “thors”.)
—
In seriousness the above only really applies at University level, where you have adults who are there with the intention to learn and then receive a final certification that they did indeed learn. Who cares if some of them cheat on their homework? They’ll fail their finals and more fool them.
With children though, there’s a much bigger responsibility on teachers to raise them as moral beings who will achieve their full potential. I can see why high schools get very anxious about raising kids to be something other than prompt engineers.
>there’s a much bigger responsibility on teachers to raise them as moral beings who will achieve their full potential.
There's nothing moral about busywork for busywork's sake. If their entire adult life they'll have access to AI, then school will prepare them much better for life if it lets them use AI and teaches them how to use it best and how to do the things AI can't do.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadObviously we will go back to in class writing.
Oh... It is the story of my school math education. I always got bad marks, because I was "too stupid to come up with this particular solution to the problem". I didn't thought it was really unfair, because I thought myself to be lazy, and I looked for such solutions to math problems that would minimize my work. Oftentimes I ignored textbook ways to solve problems and used my own. I believed that it was a cheating, so naturally I got worse marks, but I put up with that, because I was lazy to do it in more complex way from a textbook.
That would be a pretty sad outcome. In my high school we did both in-class essays and homework essays. The former were always more poorly developed and more more poorly written. IMO students still deserve practice doing something that takes more than 45 minutes.
What may seem obvious based on earlier-era measures of student comprehension and success is not the case in many schools anymore.
Look up evidence based grading, equitable grading, test retake policies, etc.
We are seeing this with Grammarly already, where instead of a nuance Grammarly picks the beige alternative. The forerunner was the Plain English Campaign, which succeeded in official documents publicised in imprecise language at primary school reading level, it's awful.
So sure; not free, but free as in beer.
Uh huh. Except for the very very very high frequency with which they weren't.
Also, people traded favors. I'll grant you that's not technically "free," but it may as well have been.
If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
People treat AI like it's an omniscient god.
And ChatGPT will happily argue whichever side you want to take. I just passed it a review I wrote a few years ago (with no AI/LLM or similar assistance), with the prompts "Prove that this was written by an AI/LLM: <review>" and "Prove that this was written by a human, not an AI/LLM: <review>", and got the following two conclusions:
> Without metadata or direct evidence, it is impossible to definitively prove this was written by an AI. However, based on the characteristics listed, there are signs that it might have been generated or significantly assisted by an AI.[1]
> While AI models like myself are capable of generating complex and well-written content, this specific review shows several hallmarks of human authorship, including nuanced critique, emotional depth, personalized anecdotes, and culturally specific references. Without external metadata or more concrete proof, it’s not possible to definitively claim this was written by a human, but the characteristics strongly suggest that it was.[2]
How you prompt it matters.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67164ec9-9cbc-8011-b14a-f1f16dd8df...
[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/67164ee2-a838-8011-b6f0-0ba91c9f52...
For an assignment completed at home, on a student's device using software of a student's choosing, there can essentially be no proof. If the situation you describe becomes common, it might make sense for a school to invest into a web-based text editor that capture keystrokes and user state and requiring students use that for at-home text-based assignments.
That or eliminating take-home writing assignments--we had plenty of in-class writing when I went to school.
According to an undergraduate student who babysits for our child, some students are literally screen recording the entire writing process, or even recording themselves writing at their computers as a defense against claims of using AI. I don't know how effective that defense is in practice.
That, or the uni shall give me a separate machine to write on, only for that purpose.
Well yes, in-person proctored is the gold standard. For those who can’t or won’t go in person, something invasive is really the only alternative to entirely exam-based scoring.
So no, you don’t exactly get a trial by a jury of your peers, but it isn’t like they are averse to evidence being presented.
This evidence would be fairly trivial to refute, but I agree it is a burden no student needs or wants.
They issue the claim, the judgement and the penalty. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Why? Because they *are* the law.
You can sue the university, and likely even win.
They literally are not the law, and that is why you can take them to court.
A kid living in a wealthy Boston suburb used AI for his essay (that much is not in doubt) and the family is now suing the district because the school objected and his chances of getting into a good finishing school have dropped.
On the other hand you have students attending abusive online universities who are flagged by their plagiarism detector and they wouldn't ever think of availing themselves of the law. US law is for the rich, the purpose of a system is what it does.
You don’t need to be rich to change the law. You do need to be determined, and most people don’t have or want to spend the time.
Literally none of that changes the fact that the Universities are not, themselves, the law.
But that they can be sued in a court of law is actually a very big deal; it is the defining thing that makes them not the law.
A reminder of what I was responding to: “They issue the claim, the judgement and the penalty. And there is nothing you can do about it. Why? Because they are the law.”
That is plainly untrue. There is something you can do about it. You can sue them, precisely because they are not the law.
They’re not. That doesn’t make it less stressful, annoying, or unnecessary to fight them.
Police aren't the law because they have been sued?
Your police argument is a strawman.
Don't know why these companies are spending so much developing this technology, when their customers clearly aren't checking how well it works.
These limited time-window assessments are also (a) artificial (don't always reflect how the person might use their knowledge later) (b) stressful (some people work better/worse with a clock ticking) and (c) subject to more variability due to the time pressure (what if you're a bit sick, or have had a bad day or are just tired during the time window?).
AI makes it impossible to rely on out-of-class assignments to evaluate the kids' knowledge. How we respond to that is unclear, but relying on cheating detectors is not going to work.
Teacher explains material, you get homework about the material and are graded on it.
It shouldn't be like that. If the work (i.e. the exercises) are important to grasp the material, they should be done in class.
Also removes the need of hiring tutors.
I'd like to offer what I've come to realize about the concept of homework. There are two main benefits to it: [1] it could help drill in what you learned during the lecture and [2] it could be the "boring" prep work that would allow teachers to deliver maximum value in the classroom experience.
Learning simply can't be confined in the classroom. GP suggestion would be, in my view, detrimental for students.
[1] can be done in class but I don't think it should be. A lot of students already lack the motivation to learn the material by themselves and hence need the space to make mistakes and wrap their heads around the concept. A good instructor can explain any topic (calculus, loops and recursion, human anatomy) well and make the demonstration look effortless. It doesn't mean, however, that the students have fully mastered the concept after watching someone do it really well. You only start to learn it once you've fluffed through all the pitfalls at least mostly on your own.
[2] can't be done in class, obviously. You want your piano teacher to teach you rhythm and musical phrasing, hence you better come to class already having mastered notation and the keyboard and with the requisite digital dexterity to perform. You want your coach to focus on the technical aspects of your game, focus on drilling you tactics; you don't want him having to pace you through conditioning exercises---that would be a waste of his expertise. We can better discuss Hamlet if we've all read the material and have a basic idea of the plot and the characters' motivations.
That said, it might make sense to simply not grade homeworks. After all, it's the space for students to fail. Unfortunately, if it weren't graded, a lot of students will just skip it.
Ultimately, it's a question of behavior, motivation, and incentives. I agree that the current system, even pre-AI, could only barely live up to ideals [1] and [2] but I don't have any better system in mind either, unfortunately.
I fundamentally disagree - I vividly remember, many times during homework in maths for example, I realised that I am stuck and so don’t understand something explained earlier, and I need to ask someone. For me, my parents were able to help. But later in Highschool, when you get to differential equations - they no longer can. And obviously if your parents are poorly educated they can’t rather.
Second point, there is no feedback loop this way - a teacher should see how difficult is his homework, how much time students spend on it, and why they are struggling. Marking a piece of paper does not do it. There was wild inconsistency between teachers for how much homework they would set and how long they thought it would take students.
Lastly, the school + homework should be able to accommodate tag the required learning within 1 working day. It is anyway a form of childcare while parents work
It’s not when you reframe it in Puritanical terms. Keep the children busy for 12 hours per day: If they get some practice on their courses, great, but busy, quiet children won’t fall in with the devil.
I wish I could get a refund on all the wasted childhood I spent doing useless homework on subjects I have not used since. No, it didn’t make me “a well-rounded person,” it just detracted from the time I could spend learning about computers—a subject my school could not teach me.
- placing less emphasis on numerical grades to disincentive cheating (hard to measure success) - open response written questions (harder to teach, harder to grade) - reading books (hard to determine if students actually did it) - proof based math (hard to teach)
Instead we keep imagining more absurd surveillance systems “what if we can track student eyes to make sure they actually read the paragraph”
but somehow, we don't trust teacher anymore. Those in power want to check that the teacher actually makes his job so they want to see wome written, reviewable proof... So the grades are there both to control the student and the teacher. WWW (What a wonderful world).
On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It's a hard call: teach to the cheaters or teach to the good kids?
I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade. I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams. Hopefully that removes the incentive to cheat. If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.
(Even with homework worth little, I still get copy-pasted ChatGPT answers on homework by some students... the ones that did poorly on the exams...)
I'd be cautious about that, because it means the kids with undiagnosed ADHD who are functionally incapable of studying without enforced assignments will just completely crash and burn without absorbing any of the material at all.
Or, at least, that's what happened to me in the one and only pre-college class I ever had where "all work is self-study and only the tests count" was the rule.
My second and third semesters went exactly as you described for courses where I was exposed to new things and wasn't just repeating high school - mainly because I had no training or coping mechanisms for learning under that type of pedagogy.
After getting my ass kicked in exams and failing a class for the first time in my life, I finally grokked that optional homework assignments were the professor's way of communicating learning milestones to us, and that even though the professor said they weren't graded (unless you asked), you still had to do them or you wouldn't learn the material well enough to pass the exam.
Still had a few bad grades because of the shit foundation I built for myself, but I brought a 2.2 GPA up to a 3.3 by the end.
The point is that it takes is exposure to that style of teaching before it can really be effective.
I feel like this is almost exactly moving all evaluation into the class. If "little" becomes nothing, it is exactly that.
I feel this was always the best strategy. In college, how much homework assignments were worth was an easy way to evaluate how bad the teacher was and how lightweight the class was going to be. My best professors dared you not to do your homework, and would congratulate you if you could pass their exams without having done it.
The very best ones didn't even want you to turn it in, they'd only assign problems that had answers in the back of the book. Why put you through a entire compile cycle of turning it in, having a TA go over it, and getting it back when you were supposed to be onto the next thing? Better and cheaper to find out you're wrong quickly.
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of high school)
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of university)
There are more students than ever, and lots of schools now offer remote programs, or just remote options in general for students, to accommodate for the increased demand.
There's little political will to revert to the old ways, as it would drive up the costs. You need more space and you need more workers.
I’ll give you a hint: they’re not ignorant.
We don't do calculations: computers do it for us.
We don't accumulate knowledge: we trust Google to give us the information when needed.
Everything in a small package everyone can wear all day long. We're at the second step of transhumanism.
I got AI answer saying ‘no’, but actually you do.
If I use a calculator it will be correct. If I open encyclopaedia it will mostly be correct, because someone with a brain did at least 5 minutes of thining.
We are not talking about some minor detail, AI makes colossal errors with great confidence and conviction.
GPS is great at knowing where you are, but directions are much much harder, and the extra difficulty is why the first version of Apple Maps was widely ridiculed.
Even now, I find it's a mistake to just assume Google Maps can direct me around Berlin public transport better than my own local knowledge — sometimes it can, sometimes it can't.
(But yes, a single original Pi Zero beats all humans combined at arithmetic even if all of us were at the level of the world record holder).
After I moved here and learned the system, I realised it had on my first trip directed me through a series of unnecessary train routes for a 5 minute walk.
Last summer, when trying to find a specific named cafe a friend was at, Google Maps tried to have me walk 5 minutes to the train station behind me to catch the train to the stop in front of me to walk back to… the other side of the street because I hadn't recognised the sign.
It's a great tool, fantastic even, but it still doesn't beat local knowledge. And very occasionally, invisibly unless you hit the edge, the map isn't correctly joined at the nodes and you can spot the mistake even as a first time visitor.
To be honest, we do for most things: I have not checked the speed of light. And I surely would not be able to implement a way to measure it from only my observations and experience.
At least not having to care about arithmetic leaves more time to care about mathematics.
I mean I'm skeptical about AI as well and don't like it, but I can see it becoming a force multiplier itself.
Posters here love to bring out this argument, but I think a major weakness is that those people wound up being right. People don't memorize things any more! I don't think it's fair to hold out as an example of fears which didn't come to pass, as they very much did come to pass.
....
and it made no difference.
The easiest for someone here to see is probably code generation. You can point at parts of it and go "this part is from a high-school level tutorial", "this looks like it was grabbed from college assignments", and "this is following 'clean code' rules in silly places"(like assuming a vector might need to be Nd, instead of just 3D).
If they could make it elsewhere, they would.
I don’t expect this to be a popular take here, and most replies will be NAXALT fallacies, but in aggregate it’s the truth. Sorry, your retired CEO physics teacher who you loved was not a representative sample.
Switzerland and Finland comes to mind.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-salaries-teachers...
110k in Switzerland is a good pay today. The article is from 2017.
I would question the utility of engaging.
Moreover, women never needed to start out as teachers to "be ready for childcare". The childcare expectations were much lower at the time, but amount of chores at home massively higher.
Hey, he was Microsoft’s patent attorney who retired to teach calculus!
"and then a bunch" is somewhat misleading. They in fact take easier and fewer classes in the subjects that they are studying for, but they have to take extra classes on education, which afaik are not that hard to pass. Getting a "Lehramt" degree is much easier than getting the regular degree in a subject, which is why many people that are simply not good enough for the real thing do it.
Also we have a teacher shortage and more and more teachers are not in fact people that received an education you usually have to get as a teacher, but are just regular people with either a degree in the subject they are teaching or a degree in almost anything (depends on how desperate the schools are and what subjects they are hiring for).
Because if you're putting forth the assertion "If they could make it elsewhere, they would." you've certainly had spent sometime teaching, yes?
I think it would be good to understand how much experience teaching it took for you to come to that conclusion.
Anyone who's been around AI generated content for more than five minutes can tell you what's legitimate and what isn't.
For example this: https://www.maersk.com/logistics-explained/transportation-an... is obviously an AI article.
to some degree of accuracy.
A. The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art.
B. The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm#:~:te....
I think it is, however the dream among educators of an “AI detector” is so strong that they’re willing to believe “these guys are the ones that cracked the problem” over and over, when it’s not entirely true. They try it out themselves with some simple attempts and find that it mostly works and conclude the company’s claims are true. The problem though is that their tests are all trying to pass off AI-generated work as human-generated—not the other way around. Since these tools have a non-zero false positive rate, there will always exist some poor kid who slaved away on a 20-page term paper for weeks that gets popped for using AI. That kid has no recourse, no appeals—the school spent a lot of money on the AI detector, and you better believe that it’s right.
This is what will eventually happen. Some component or provider deep in the stack will provide some answer and organizations will be sufficiently shrouded from hard decisions and be able to easily point to "the system."
This happens all the time in the US. Addresses are changed randomly because some address verification system feedback was accepted w/o account owner approval -- call customer service and they say "the system said that your address isnt right", as if the system knows where i've been living for the past 5yrs better than me, better than the DMV, better than the deed on my house. If the error rate is low enough, people just accept it in the US.
Then, it gets worse. Perhaps the error rate isnt low, just that it is high for a sub-group. Then you get to see how you rank in society. Ask brown people in 2003-2006 how fun it was to fly. If you have the wrong last name and zipcode combo in NYC suddenly you arent allowed to rent citibikes despite it operating on public land.
The same will happen with this, unless there is some massive ACLU lawsuit which exposes and the damages will continue until there is a resolution. Quite possibly subtle features on language style will get used as triggers, probably unknowingly. People in the "in-group" who arent exposed will claim it is a fair system while others will be forced to defend themselves and have to provide the burden of proof on a blackbox.
I suspect there is a product opportunity here. It could be as simple as a chrome extension that records your sessions in google docs and generates a timelapse of your writing process. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to fake and could convince an accuser that you really did write the essay. At the very least it could be useful insurance in case you’re accused.
I have absolutely no problem using it in a more advanced field where the basics are already done and the focus is on research, for example, but at lower levels I'd likely consider it dishonest.
She loves it. It doesn’t cause her to be any less attentive to her writing; it just makes it possible to write.
I was not really referring to accommodations under the ADA. For people that do not require accommodations, the use of them is unfair to their classmates and can be detrimental to their ability to perform without them in the future, as there is no requirement to have the accommodations available to them. This is not the case for someone with dyslexia.
So if anyone knows a good tool, that is flexible enough to support proper writing and able to run locally on a machine, hints appreciated.
However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner.
I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting them to do the things they want them to do, but don’t work.
But if they are not otherwise checked it would be quite useless.
The problem is, if it has been that badly tested that it detects Lenovo laptops as weapons, there is a good chance that it doesn't properly detect actual weapons either.
There hasn't been a school shooting in the UK for nearly 30 years. Handguns were banned after the last school shooting and there hasn't been one since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:School_shootings_in_t...
Although that fact is sometimes forgotten by schools who copy the US in having "active shooter drills" though. Modern schools sound utterly miserable.
got a license for that mate?
The US has more stabbings per-capita than the UK does, even on top of the shootings.
Licensing wouldn't be worthwhile as almost every household would want knives for food preparation.
It would indeed be a miracle as the US would drastically have to reduce their number of shootings to get down to the number of UK mass stabbings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_stabbings_in_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
It seems to me like victim blaming for U.S. schools to have active shooter drills - it makes more sense to have much better training and screening of gun owners than trying to train the victims. However, given that the NRA is excessively powerful in U.S. politics, I can see why they are necessary, but it just seems easier to me to stop kids from being able to get hold of guns (e.g. have some rudimentary screening for gun purchases and require owners to keep them in locked cabinets when they are not in use).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
People are willing to believe almost anything as long as it makes their lives a little more convenient.
"How do we stop Z? X and Y are the cause of Z.
The thing is, I said gun control, but I'm not even sure that's real issue. I kinda took it backward. There are mass shootings because of the ease of access to guns, but it's not the ease of access to guns that pushes people to this.
In other ords, remove the guns, the mechanisms that drive people to think they want to kill remains. I might be wrong but it feels like in Europe there are more and more cold weapons attacks, or the use of ramming trucks.
I guess I have no suggestions.
As for the problems that would persist even if we could ban guns: I don’t know how to fix those, either.
50 million K12 students in the U.S. — how many mass murders are “regular?”
Rather than trying to diminish something that's completely preventable and abhorrent maybe we could discuss ways to actually prevent it. Because this isn't a problem anywhere else so clearly it's preventable.
If AI can be part of a solution here this is a reasonable place to discuss it.
Every place with more guns has more shootings. It is so simple it seems almost tautological. Yet somehow this very simple fact is controversial.
But based on this 2022 statistics USA really has a thing going on with school shootings... more than a hundred per year is way too much. I would definitely consider it "regularly" even if it seems a low number statistically (50 million students === 1 shooter / 500000 student ~?~ 1 shooting / 1000 school).
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19982.jpeg
I work with people in their 30s That cannot write their way out of a hat. Who cares if the work is AI assisted or not. Most AI writing is super dry, formulaic and bad. The student doesn’t recognize this the give them a poor mark for having terrible style.
Actually being able to generate good text is entirely separate evaluation. And AI might have place there.
LLM can generate text that is as entertaining and whimsical as its training dataset gets with no effort on your side
Post-apocalyptic education
What comes after the Homework Apocalypse
by Ethan Mollick
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education
Amusingly, you can push ChatGPT type systems into other styles of writing.
I put in the preamble to the US constitution and asked for different styles:
Modern:
We, the people of the United States, come together to build a stronger, more united country. We want to create fairness for everyone, keep peace at home, ensure our safety, support each other’s well-being, and protect our freedoms for ourselves and future generations. This is why we are establishing this Constitution for the United States.
Gun nut:
We the People of the United States, rallying together to create a stronger, more unified nation, are all about upholding justice, keeping the peace at home, and defending our rights. We’re here to support one another, ensure our freedoms, and safeguard the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations. That’s why we’re putting this Constitution in place for the United States of America—because we believe in freedom, security, and our right to bear arms!
Woke:
We, the people of the United States, are coming together to create a more inclusive and equitable society. Our goal is to establish justice for all, promote peace within our communities, ensure safety for everyone, and uplift the well-being of every individual. We are committed to protecting our freedoms and rights, not just for ourselves, but for future generations. This is why we are enacting this Constitution for the United States of America, to foster a nation that values diversity, equality, and the dignity of all.
Christian:
We, the people of the United States, gather together in faith and unity to build a more perfect nation under God. Our purpose is to establish justice and promote peace in our homes and communities. We strive to protect our common security and care for one another’s well-being, guided by the principles of love and compassion. In doing so, we seek to uphold the blessings of liberty that God has granted us, not just for ourselves, but for future generations. This is why we commit to this Constitution for the United States of America, as we seek to honor His will in all that we do.
If you're having trouble with essays being detected as AI, you can run them through an LLM to rewrite them in a different tone.
We, the people of the United States, unite to forge a more harmonious society, guided by the principles of collective strength and shared responsibility. Our aim is to establish justice and maintain social stability, ensuring the well-being of all citizens through solidarity and mutual support. By safeguarding our national defense and promoting the common welfare, we embody the spirit of unity and progress. This commitment to our foundational values is why we establish this Constitution for the United States of America, as we work toward a prosperous future for all.
MAGA:
We, the great people of the United States, are coming together to create a stronger, more united nation. Our mission is to establish true justice, ensure peace in our communities, and defend our country with pride. We’re all about promoting the well-being of hard-working Americans and securing our freedoms for ourselves and future generations. That’s why we’re affirming this Constitution for the United States of America—because we believe in making our nation great and preserving our rights for all!
Martin Luther King:
We, the people of the United States, come together in a spirit of unity and purpose, striving to create a more perfect union. It is our sacred duty to establish justice and ensure tranquility in our communities, uplifting one another in love and understanding. We must provide for the common defense and promote the welfare of all, recognizing that true freedom is a collective journey. In this endeavor, we seek to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations. Therefore, we affirm this Constitution for the United States of America as a testament to our commitment to equality, justice, and the enduring hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Trump:
We, the amazing people of the United States, are coming together to build a tremendous nation, folks. Our goal? To create a more perfect union—believe me, it’s going to be fantastic! We’re establishing real justice, keeping our communities safe, and defending our great country. We’re promoting the welfare of all hardworking Americans and securing our incredible freedoms for ourselves and our future generations. That’s why we’re putting this Constitution in place for the United States of America—because we’re making America great again, and nobody does it better!
ChatGPT has automatic blithering nailed.
Helping kids find value in education is the only important concern here and adding an AI checker doesn't help with that.
Exactly. It also does the complete opposite. It teaches kids from fairly early on that their falsely flagged texts might as well be just written with AI, further discouraging them from improving their writing skills. Which are still just as useful with AI or not.
For those going to college, I strongly advise picking a department where such scanning is not performed.
For those in public school, sue.
This is an ethics problem (people willing to cheat), this is a multi cultural problem (different expectations of what constitutes cheating) this is an incentive problem (credentialism makes cheating worth it).
Those are hard problems. So a little tech that might scare students and give the professor a feeling of control is a band aid.
I want to emphasize, that this isn't really about trusting magic, it's about people nonchalantly doing ridiculous stuff nowdays and that they aren't held accountable for that, apparently. For example, there were times back at school when I was "accused" of cheating, because it was the only time when I liked the homework at some class and took it seriously, and it was kinda insulting to hear that there's absolutely no way I did it, but I still got my mark, because it doesn't matter what she thinks if she cannot prove it, so please just sign it and fuck off, it's the last time I'm doing my homework at your class anyway.
On the contrary, if this article to be believed, these teachers don't have to prove anything, the fact that a coin flipped heads is considered enough of a proof. And everyone supposedly treats it as if it's ok. "Well, they have this system at school, what can we do!" It's crazy.
That's how you can mold society as you like at your level: this student's older sibling was a menace? Let's fuck them over, being shitty must run in the family. You don't like the race / gender / sexuality of a student? Now "chatGPT" can give you an easy way to make their school life harder.
Just introduce an incomprehensible process, Like applying for a Visa or planning permission, and then use it to your advantage.
From the victims perspective, there is no difference between bureaucracy and AI
I agree. But now some people can point to ChatGPT or other tools and use it as an excuse. So for them, the "bugs" are a feature. They don't care about false positives, they care about the fact some authority tells them a student they don't like used AI to write an essay.
People trust a system because other people trust a system.
It does not matter if the system is the inquisition looking for witches, machine or Gulag from USSR.
The system said you are guilty. The system can’t be wrong.
Kafka is rolling in his grave.
There was recent article about yet another generated text in the US court, this time without malicious intent (it seems). The article boils down to the fact that the plaintiff asked neural network to do a historical financial calculation of property cost and immediately trusted it, "because computers". Computers are always correct, NNs run on computers, hence they are always correct :) . Soon this mentality will be in every household on the planet. We will be remembering days of media dishonesty and propaganda with fondness, at least previously we kinda could discern if the source was intentionally lying.
Well, you shouldn’t be so surprised. You just described 95%+ of the population’s approach to any form of technology. And there’s very rarely any discomfort with such ignorance, nor any desire to learn even the basics. It’s very hard to understand for me — some of us just have to know!
If I was still in school I would write my docs in a Google Doc which provides the edit history. I could potentially also record video of me typing the entire document as well or screen recording my screen.
“After her work was flagged, Olmsted says she became obsessive about avoiding another accusation. She screen-recorded herself on her laptop doing writing assignments. She worked in Google Docs to track her changes and create a digital paper trail. She even tried to tweak her vocabulary and syntax. “I am very nervous that I would get this far and run into another AI accusation,” says Olmsted, who is on target to graduate in the spring. “I have so much to lose.”
That said, I'd imagine if someone resorts to using generative text their edits would contain anomalies that someone legitimately writing wouldn't have in terms of building out the structure/drafts. Perhaps that in itself could be auto detected more reliably.
It seems like a long term loosing proposition.
Sounds like a good candidate to IPO early
(“Thorough examination” as a term is too long though — let’s just call them “thors”.)
—
In seriousness the above only really applies at University level, where you have adults who are there with the intention to learn and then receive a final certification that they did indeed learn. Who cares if some of them cheat on their homework? They’ll fail their finals and more fool them.
With children though, there’s a much bigger responsibility on teachers to raise them as moral beings who will achieve their full potential. I can see why high schools get very anxious about raising kids to be something other than prompt engineers.
There's nothing moral about busywork for busywork's sake. If their entire adult life they'll have access to AI, then school will prepare them much better for life if it lets them use AI and teaches them how to use it best and how to do the things AI can't do.