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

But if their justification for assigning the score is a factual claim that I broke the rules, they'd best be ready to justify that claim or they're committing defamation.

Grades in university have done absolutely nothing for me. Good grades nor bad grades. What I got out of schooling was quite literally an education – access to perspectives and paradigms, learning methodologies, some expertise in a couple of fields, confidence in working with others. You know... learning.

There's not a lot of value in using AI for targeted tasks like a school essay. Nor is there much value in getting a grade for a targeted task like an essay (not only would the grade be high-noise and low-signal, it also has a tiny or non-existent practical effect).

I wonder if these AI tools will to some extent highlight the meaningless fluff (crust?) that vestigially hangs around. If our current incarnation of task-oriented AI is really good at some particular thing, and we humans readily hand that thing over to AI without regret/loss, what are the chances that that thing really mattered in the first place?

(Note that this is not to hypothesize that all things AI does are non-important.)

I personally believe that we have a weak grasp on the things we do that don't matter. We do a lot of things because we have always done them, and some of these have not been adequately questioned in years/decades. So any indication of what's important or not is very helpful.

(I'm aware my circumstances are unique – maybe for some grades in school have had a significant influence in their lives – I personally have not witnessed this, in myself or others.)

"I used a magic 8 ball to predict the future."

"They don't predict the future."

"I know their predictions are statistically quite bad, so I used a magic 8 ball three times to make sure there wasn't any doubt."

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How much allure for these products is there that a college professor can be on HN, know that the tools don't work, and still use them anyway?

And how are students supposed to combat that kind of misuse if even educating professors about the problem isn't enough to make them stop trusting the detectors? And for a professor to then to brag about it on HN that they're being responsible as if they expect to be praised for it?

It's just so frustrating to read... What do you do if you're a student in that situation, do you have to sit your professor down and not only show that the tools have problems but also explain the concept of correlated error?

I kind of feel like the only way this changes is with legal challenges to colleges until they eventually ban the tools from being used in grading. Public pushback isn't going to change it, schools aren't going to care about that. And if educating about the problems isn't going to change behavior, I can't expect students to walk every one of their professors through a stats class. I don't know what if any legal rights at all students actually have in these situations, I'm guessing most colleges have boilerplate that if they decide to randomly fail you tough luck.

But at the very least, @jccalhoun you should stop using these programs yourself; you have the individual ability to make your own classroom better, and you should.

> Take your money elsewhere. Education should be a market.

You're absolutely right, and any participants in this market should be looking to maximize their grade per dollar spent.

(What do you think they should be maximizing?)

It's called "a posture of shallow cynicism" that adds nothing to the discussion.