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"You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

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Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#101
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways. I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.

If students believe that these are their only options, they are either tragically misled, or misleading themselves.

I don't follow. Could you expand on that?

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#102
post #3

AI Detection services are the oiliest of snake oils. Seems like education is going to need to change drastically in the next few years. Maybe we'll go all the way back to oral examinations again.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

When I was a student decades ago it was when they first introduced anti-plagiarism software. We all had to submit a printed out copy of our book reports along with a floppy disk or cd-rom of our report in the latest Microsoft Word format. Almost the whole class was flagged for plagiarism. Of course the school takes plagiarism very seriously so we all had to have a one-on-one with the principal. The real truth is no one copied each others work and it was the anti-plagiarism software flagging essays because students quoted parts of the book and expanded on that. In hindsight as an adult I think the excessive principal one-on-ones was the teachers way of shoving it to him and his new software.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I should have used the correct org terms. But, as the parent of an Eagle scout, I think my point still stands. Either they can, or can't, trust the Eagle to be honest. IMHO, that trust should be a necessary condition for awarding Eagle. And if the council isn't capable of making that call, then they're perhaps unqualified for deciding whether or not to award Eagle rank. (I realize my position is a bit simplist…

The council-level Eagle Board of Reviewers likely didn't know the individual scouts and were simply applying their individual knowledge about the content reviewed compared to the whole and made, in this case, poor assumptions about the quality of writing they should expect. As it relates to academia today, this is now happening at a larger scale with folks lacking more trust, not having to think critically about the…

I've started referring to this phenomena as "Goodhart's Hell." We're living in a world with quickly increasing complexity. Variance in samples is much larger because our reach in what we sample is larger (we talk to people far from our homes, with different cultures, interpretations of words, language patterns, behaviors, ethics, etc). But we've responded to this only by simplifying our evaluations. We've created more tools and metrics that can help guide us, but we don't use them as guides but answers. We're using mathematics/technology not as a tool or language, but a black box. A black box with high accuracy too! Noise/uncertainty has increased but so has our confidence in our answers. It is entirely unwarranted. In essence, we are just hacking metrics and over-fitting our models to increase laziness and comfort. Our ever pursuit of meritocracy ironically takes us further from achieving the goals because we are unwilling to embrace the noise that is inherent to the system, believing that the noise is a lie, believing we can accurately measure everything to absolute (or even meaningful) precision. We have not only abandoned nuance but have actively turned against it and I do not know why. I think it deserves the hell in its name.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#104

As a professor at a community college, I am very hesitant to just declare something is AI generated unless is it very clear. If I suspect something is AI generated I run it through 3 different checkers that I found online and if they don't all agree then I don't call it plagiarism. Normally the writing is so vague that it isn't more than a C anyway.

>3 different checkers that I found online and if they don't all agree then I don't call it plagiarism

How do you verify these "different checkers" aren't all going to the same api or using the same software? How do you know they aren't using a similar heuristic method? What is the false positive rate of each? Have you seen the research that shows text from non-native speakers are more often falsely detected as being AI[1]?

[1] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1705057915625697712

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#105
post #86
post #9

I am an Eagle Scout and was awarded it in 1995. As part of that process, I had to write up a detailed document outlining my project including how it was conceived, the work, and the outcome. It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS. My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lo…

wow, computers writing essays that cannot be distinguished from human written essays and the ramifications of this have been going on for… ever. i dont know how to say it nicely… youre just blatantly wrong.

Right. I don't know what to call it, but I'm annoyed by the near pathological need for some people to respond to every piece of news with "same as it ever was".

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt oral examinations come back in general. The undergrad model relys on massive classes, I don’t see how you can do oral exams in those 300 person classes without massive cheating as the first students tell everyone else what to expect.

Is there any value to those lectures, nowadays? I can see a PhD lecture on the fundamentals of virtually any academic topic, for free and at my leisure, on youtube and similar sites. Waking up at 8am to attend an in-person Geology 117 lecture with 300 other freshmen is probably as outdated as a fax machine. Perhaps the next step is, education that isn't based on personal instruction isn't rare enough to be worth payi…

As a PhD candidate (post classes) I honestly use those lectures a lot. No, I do not find a massive classroom better than an online lecture. Actually worse. The advantage of a classroom over a video lecture is the ability to interrupt and ask questions. To have the expert in front of you. In this day and age, sitting in a classroom and not participating is an entire waste of money and you're doing yourself a disservice by not participating.

I actively remind my students this when I teach, who honestly are less active post pandemic. It is something I worry about. And though my account is "anonymous", if you ever show up to my lectures, not as a student but just sitting in (I don't take attendance, idk if you walk off the street and want to sit in), you too are welcome to participate.

(Fwiw, there aren't really "PhD level lectures" so much as graduate lectures. Generally you stop taking classes at the end of year 2 in your PhD, which is equivalent to a masters. The distinction of the PhD is that you are learning to learn on your own. This does add extra context to why grad students ask for higher pay, especially at the non-conditional and candidate levels, as they're actually taking less resources from the school. E.g. I pay the school $10k/term (big round) for research credits, which requires no involvement from anyone. There no longer is the "student" part to my "51% student, 49% employee" split)

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#107
post #21
post #8

I would sue the teacher and school if this happened to me… total BS. Also plagarism and having other people do your work, or even take exams for you is as old as time. How is AI any different? Some trust is in order here. The students are the ones paying to be educated, if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.

>if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways. I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.

I find the “liberal arts” thing weird. First, as a scientist with an engineering degree, I definitely feel if you cheat through school you’re only cheating yourself. In the hard sciences a lack of knowledge and ability is pretty easy to suss out. The degree gets you the interview, the network might open a door or two, but the education is how you get the job. And once you’ve got it, if you didn’t learn anything, you will be fired fast.

It’s more likely in a liberal art you can fluff your way through life living a continuous con. But heres the thing - they still are cheating themselves. Because the only thing a certificate and a network based on lies gives you is hollow employment built on lies. The education is what gives you a career and a life worth living.

So, maybe that’s old school, but I’ve rarely found old school wisdom to be wrong. It has, after all, withstood the filter of time.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#108
post #9

I am an Eagle Scout and was awarded it in 1995. As part of that process, I had to write up a detailed document outlining my project including how it was conceived, the work, and the outcome. It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS. My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lo…

> This is nothing new; it’s been happening forever and will continue to happen, we just have a new reason to drive a race to the bottom. The joke about the pinewood derby was that you could always tell the one kid who actually built his own car (which was the whole point, after all). Because every other car had been carefully engineered, carved, machined, sanded, painted, lacquered, and weighted by a dad. Sounds like…

If the point of pinewood derby is not to at least provide an opportunity (not necessity) for kids and parents to work on a project together, I don't know what is.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#109
I am an educator at a UK university. The essay is rapidly ceasing to be an appropriate way to assess students knowledge and critical thinking.

We regularly organise in person face to face practical exams for our entire several hundred strong year group of undergraduates. It is possible to do assessment properly if the will is there.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#110
post #9

I am an Eagle Scout and was awarded it in 1995. As part of that process, I had to write up a detailed document outlining my project including how it was conceived, the work, and the outcome. It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS. My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lo…

I had a similar experience in the 5th grade. We had a creative writing assignment (write x many pages), and I wrote a short story about "space spiders" that spun giant webs between planets and moons to catch something. I can't recall.

The only thing more mundane and unimaginative than that two pages was my teacher, who accused me of plagiarizing it.

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