A.I. and the Future of Cheating • Hacker News Board

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#11

Post by AlexCoventry » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

lucasmullens wrote: post #2

> If a university has no way of determining whether an assignment was written by a human or an algorithm, existing grading systems lose any semblance of meritocracy or fairness. Just because it was hard to tell if it was written by an AI doesn't mean the paper succeeds at whatever the assignment was. All GPT-2 does is predict the next word. I don't see how this can be used to write a research paper.

XLNet and Transformer-XL can maintain a memory of the last thousand or so tokens. The results are pretty remarkable. Check out the hallucinated Napoleonic-history wikipedia article at the bottom of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02860.pdf

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#12

Post by mannykannot » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

The article quotes Miles Brundage:

“If it is not being used in an illicit fashion, A.I. can be a boon for generating larger, more ambitious, more creative text documents — similar to how calculators have been used to help develop the skills we want to be teaching.”

and it continues:

Calculators have spared maths and science students the laborious pain of long calculations and allowed for more advanced syllabuses, designed with the knowledge that students will have access to calculators when answering them.

The issue I have with this is that the role of the essay in education is not comparable to that of the sort of tasks that calculators automate. If there is an analog of calculators in essay-writing, it would be things like grammar-correctors and style checkers.

If AI could be used in the manner envisioned in the quote, we could end up with people writing essays that they do not understand, and presenting arguments for positions that they could not defend. I am not sure that this would be progress. It might be a way for the machines to take over.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#13

Post by notduncansmith » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…

Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.

This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#14

Post by jancsika » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:44 AM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…

> Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time.

Case in point-- no one plays chess anymore.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#15

Post by blurbleblurble » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:48 AM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #8

blurbleblurble wrote: post #7

The future of cheating is large corporations and billionaires using automation to accumulate more society points without giving back to the hard working people who make it all possible in the first place. * Note: this is also the present of cheating. * * Note: I hope this cynical statement of mine doesn't come true.

The future of cheating is no one having to work so hard, because machines are doing all the boring work.

I like your idea better

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#16

Post by symplee » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:49 AM UTC

Highly recommend testing this new cheating tool out by entering a custom prompt at https://talktotransformer.com/ (which uses GPT-2) and reading what the AI generates for your custom essay snippet.

A single sentence with a euphemism should suffice...

"I" was able to create some hilarious franken-stories. Anyone care to share their greatest hits?

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#17

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:55 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #14

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…

> Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. Case in point-- no one plays chess anymore.

There is a difference between hobbies/sports and work.

We still have horse riding, but FedEx doesn't evaluate horse riding ability before hiring delivery drivers.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#18

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:56 AM UTC

notduncansmith wrote: post #13

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.

This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.

Exactly, it would be like colleges grading on the ability to add up long columns of numbers and complaining about spreadsheets.

At one time, being able to add up long columns of number accurately using only a pencil and paper was a valuable business skill, now not so much.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#19

Post by riversflow » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

notduncansmith wrote: post #13

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.

This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.

Doesn’t like /every/ good job require something along the lines of “Excellent Oral and Written communication”? Essays aren’t a proxy for anything, they are an end of itself. Just because this test essay can be written by an algorithm doesn’t mean that an algorithm can create actual original content you’d be expected to put out at a job.

Re: A.I. and the Future of Cheating

#20

Post by benbreen » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

notduncansmith wrote: post #13

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.

This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.

Am a university professor who frequently assigns essays, so this is something I've been thinking a lot about. The problem is not that AI can successfully write a college-level essay (maybe someday, but certainly GPT-2 isn't even close to that level yet). It's that something along the lines of GPT-2 can emulate the superficial appearance of an essay. The actual facts, quotes, and references it generates are generally nonsensical, but the structure, grammar and language seem authentic at first glance. Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud.

The issue isn't so much that AI has replaced essay writing. It's that it has the potential to create convincing (but fundamentally nonsensical/illogical) replicas of academic essays, which have the potential to make an already difficult job of assessment even harder (somewhat analogous to the problem of deepfakes).

By the way, I'm currently thinking about writing something on this topic; if anyone has any thoughts please get in touch. Contact info in my profile.