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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

#151
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…

Reading this comment, it sounds to me that you live in a dystopian nightmare.

[flagged]

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

#152
post #58

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 accou…

See HyperNormalisation.

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

#153

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 real…

the students are too lazy and dumb to do their own thinking and resort to ai. the teachers are also too lazy and dumb to assess the students' work and resort to ai. ain't it funny?

It's truly a race to the bottom.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this comment, it sounds to me that you live in a dystopian nightmare.

[flagged]

Clearly the answer is airport grade security at schools and militarizing police, instead of fixing the root causes.

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

#155
I'd expect smart people to be able to use tools to make their work easier. Including AI. The bigger picture here is that the current generation of students are going to be using and relying on AI the rest of their careers anyway. Making them do things the old fashioned way is not a productive way to educate them. The availability of these tools is actually an opportunity to raise the ambition level quite a bit.

Universities and teachers will need to adjust to the reality that this stuff is here to stay. There's some value in learning how to write properly, of course. But there are other ways of doing that. And some of those ways actually involve using LLMs to criticize and correct people's work instead of having poor teachers do that.

I did some teaching while I was doing a post doc twenty years ago. Reviewing poorly written student reports isn't exactly fun and I did a fair bit of that. But it strikes me how I could use LLMs to do the reviewing for me these days. And how I could force my students to up their standards of writing.

These were computer science students. Most of them were barely able to write a coherent sentence. The bar for acceptable was depressingly low. Failing 90% of the class was not a popular option with either students or staff. And it's actually hard work reviewing poorly written garbage. And having supported a few students with their master thesis work, many of them don't really progress much during their studies.

If I were to teach that class now, I would encourage students to use all the tools available to them. Especially AI. I'd set the bar pretty high.

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

#156

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.

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.

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

#158
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe it's possible at all if any effort is made beyond prompting chat-like interfaces to "generate X". Given a hand crafted corpus of text even current llms could produce perfect style transfer for a generated continuation. If someone believes it's trivially easy to detect, then they absolutely have no idea what they are dealing with. I assume most people would make least amount of effort and simply prompt…

Are you then plagiarising if the LLM is just regurgitating stuff you’d personally written? The point of these detectors is to spot stuff the students didn’t research and write themselves. But if the corpus is your own written material then you’ve already done the work yourself.

Oh I agree, producing text by llms which is expected to be produced by human is at least deceiving and probably plagiarising. It's also skipping some important work, if we're talking about some person trying to detect it at all, usually in education context.

Student don't have to perform research or study for the given task, they need to acquire an example of text suitable for reproducing their style, text structure, to create an impression of being produced by hand, so the original task could be avoided. You have to have at least one corpus of your own work for this to work, or an adequate substitute. And you still could reject works by their content, but we are specifically talking about llm smell.

I was talking about the task of detecting llm generated text which is incredibly hard if any effort is made, while some people have an impression that it's trivially easy. It leads to unfair outcomes while giving false confidence to e.g. teachers that llms are adequately accounted for.

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

#159

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.

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…

> 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.

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

#160

I'd expect smart people to be able to use tools to make their work easier. Including AI. The bigger picture here is that the current generation of students are going to be using and relying on AI the rest of their careers anyway. Making them do things the old fashioned way is not a productive way to educate them. The availability of these tools is actually an opportunity to raise the ambition level quite a bit. Unive…

We may well need to invent new mechanisms for teaching, but I don't expect that to appear overnight.

The point of essays is not to have essays written. The teacher already knows. The point is to practice putting together a coherent thought. The process, not the product, is a the goal.

Eventually we'll come up with a way to demonstrate that along with, rather than despite, AI. But for the moment we have machines that can do the assignment much better than students can, and the students won't get any better if they let the machine do all of the work.

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