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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#111

Post by greatartiste »

For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you realise that the adage that this is just autocomplete on steroids is true.

However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#112

Post by ipaddr »

willvarfar wrote: post #90
prepend wrote: post #22

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 th…

Do you think it stupid to scan kids for weapons, or stupid to think that a metal detector will find weapons?

I think it's overboard to scan for weapons at all school but very important to scan at some schools.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#113

Post by ffujdefvjg »

jmugan wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#114

Post by arkh »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #40
jmugan wrote: post #18

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.

We don't learn directions now: we use GPS.

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.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#115

Post by trinix912 »

from-nibly wrote: post #49

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.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#116

Post by Gud »

llm_trw wrote: post #84
Gud wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some countries teaching is a highly respected profession. Switzerland and Finland comes to mind.

You can't eat respect.

They are well compensated.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-salaries-teachers...

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#117

Post by logicchains »

gorgoiler wrote: post #94

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…

>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.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#118

Post by woernsn »

greyadept wrote: post #100

I'd be really interested to run AI detectors on essays from years before the ChatGPT era, just to see if anything gets flagged.

Yes, 3 out of 500 essays were flagged as 100% AI generated. There is a paragraph in the linked article about it.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#119

Post by gosub100 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #40
jmugan wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#120

Post by kreyenborgi »

flappyeagle wrote: post #36

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.

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.
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