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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

#281
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it is not obvious. I work with junior level devs and have seen a lot of non-AI junior level code.

You mean, you work with devs who are using AI to generate their code.

Actually some of us have been in the industry for more than 22 months.

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

#282

The part that annoys me is that students apparently have no right to be told why the AI flagged their work. For any process where an computer is allowed to judge people, where should be a rule in place that demands that the algorithm be able explains EXACTLY why it flagged this person. Now this would effectively kill off the current AI powered solution, because they have no way of explaining, or even understanding, w…

> kill off the current AI powered solution, because they have no way of explaining

That's not correct. Some solution look at perplexity for specific models, some will look at ngram frequencies, and similar approaches. Almost all of those can produce a heatmap of "what looks suspicious". I wouldn't expect any of the detection systems to be like black boxes relying on LLM over the whole text.

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

#283
post #178

It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject. AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance. I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with ha…

On some exams in our university 20y ago, we were allowed to use any literature or lecture notes to answer the questions. The thing is, it was a high level abstract algebra. If you don't understand the subject, no amount of literature would help you to answer the questions correctly (unless you find the exact or a very similar question).

I believe it's still true today, but with future AI systems even highly abstract math is under the danger.

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

#284
In 2020 I had a heated debate with a fellow student and course assistant over the appropriate standard of evidence for the academic honesty judicial process of the university. They were adamant that reducing the standard of evidence while also providing less severe penalties for minor offenses would be an improvement. If only I’d had this kafkaesque example to argue my point.

I’m selfishly so glad I dodged this particular bullet in my studies.

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

#285
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us. That basically never happens and the outcome is the result of some sort of struggle. Usually just a peaceful one in the courts and legislatures and markets, but a struggle nonetheless. > new methods should be used to assess student performance. Such as? We need an answer now because students are bei…

> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now. When I was in university (Humanities degree), we had to do lots of mandatory essays throughout the year but they counted little towards your overall mark, maybe 10% iirc. The majority of marks came from mid-year & end-of-year exams. A simple change to negate AI is to not award any points for work outside exams — make it an optional chance to ge…

> make it an optional chance to get feedback from lecturers.

My sense is that if writing was entirely optional, it would be too easy for students to let it slide; having 10% count toward your grade is a good "nudge" to get honest students to actually do the work. I'd just give a little admonition at the beginning saying that I'm not going to bother checking if you use LLMs, but if you do you're an idiot, because you'll be completely unprepared for the hand-written essay you have to compose yourself in the exams.

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

#286

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 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. I ask myself when the time comes that some student will accuse the stuff of libel or slander becuase of false AI plagiarism accusations.

Or of racism. There was a thing during the pandemic where automated proctoring tools couldn't cope with people of darker skin than they were trained on; I imagine the first properly verified and scientifically valid examples of AI-detection racism will be found soon.

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

#287
post #178

It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject. AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance. I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with ha…

Just because a method of assessment became easily spoofable doesn't mean we should give up on it. Imagine if in the era before HTTPS we just said that the internet won't be really viable because it's impossible to communicate securely on it. I still feel like AI detectors would work well if we have access to the exact model, output probabilities of tokens, We can just take a bit of given text, and calculate the cumul…

Probability is not an acceptable way to determine a student's future. They may have learned from the AI and remember some of the exact phrasing, and learned writing/language cues from it as well.

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

#288
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…

Someone here at HN made a great observation about this. The problem with neural networks and their generated output is that they are programs, running on the computers. We have been training humans for more than three decade that computers are producing precise, correct and reproducible outputs. And now these NN corporations have created a random symbol generators, and they actively hide the fact that there is programmed randomness in their programs.

There was recent article about yet another generated text in the US court, this time without malicious intent (it seems). The article boils down to the fact that the plaintiff asked neural network to do a historical financial calculation of property cost and immediately trusted it, "because computers". Computers are always correct, NNs run on computers, hence they are always correct :) . Soon this mentality will be in every household on the planet. We will be remembering days of media dishonesty and propaganda with fondness, at least previously we kinda could discern if the source was intentionally lying.

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

#289
What I find disquieting about this is not that AI assistants cause this issue, but how we, as a society, are forced to react to it.

Imagine two scenarios: five years ago somebody saw this coming, and they thought we should legislate a certain mechanism to prevent students from using AI assistants to cheat. Would we have done it back then? The answer is "no", since the problem was nebulous and we deal with situations like this after they come up, not before.

Now imagine a second scenario: somebody today tells you that AIs are on their way to own and supplant our societies. They are already functionally equivalent to regular human beings in many axes, and are only gonna get better at that. And thus, we should bolster our social apparatus with pro-human shielding... What do you say, should we deal with this problem after it comes up?

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is technically legal, doesn't mean it's in any way common or part of UK culture to own a gun. There hasn't been a school shooting in the UK for nearly 30 years. Handguns were banned after the last school shooting and there hasn't been one since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:School_shootings_in_t... Although that fact is sometimes forgotten by schools who copy the US in having "active…

Yet the murder rate was unaffected by the gun ban.

Yet the USA's intentional murder rate per 100k population is 6.383 while the UK's is 1.148 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

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