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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

#481

Let's talk about the actual one page extract of her essay, which can be seen in the article, it is the second image. My take is, if she used AI to generate that, she didn't use a very good one. I don't think ChatGPT would make the grammar and clarity mistakes that you see in the image text. I see this: "should be exposed to many of these forms and models to strengthen understanding" - much better as "should be expose…

Honestly I think you could set AI entirely to the side here, it seems increasingly a cultural meme (and an unfortunately accurate one) that kids can't read or write. And not just on social media either, I've seen this crop up in official training and my professional experience matches it too. The vast majority of people in the United States just write really, really poorly, and the average reading level sits at an utterly pathetic sixth grade.

I don't wanna trot out "think of the children" bullshit here but it's hard for me to not notice that this trend has been happening since smartphones became normal and schools have increasingly become utterly toothless with regard to enforcing standards in education, i.e. "you need to know this shit in order to move to the next grade up." Nobody does that anymore. Just fudge the scores with extra credit or make-up assignments and send them up the chain to be a different teacher's problem next year.

> My opinion is, the only solution to this problem is to allow AI detectors to flag work, but that when a work is flagged, that flagging just triggers a face to face meeting between the student and the professor, where the student is required to show through discussion of the work that they understand it well enough to have written it.

You said it yourself in the subsequent paragraph, but if professors had this much time and energy to teach, their kids wouldn't be writing like deprecated GPT instances in the first place. We need to empower teachers and schools to fail children so they can be taught and experience consequences for lack of performance, and learn to do better. They have no reason to try because no one will hold them accountable, personally or systemically. We just let them fail and keep failing until they turn into failures of adults living in their parents basements playing Elden Ring all day and getting mad at each other over trivial bullshit on social media.

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

#482
post #330
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…

Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. It was always a cost saving measure because allocating 30min face to face time with each individual student for each class is such a gigantic cost for the institution that they cannot even imagine doing it. Think about that the next time you look at your student debt, it couldn’t even buy you 30min time per class individually with the teacher…

    > Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. 
I kind of disagree.

I've kept a blog for almost 20 years now and one thing is for sure: well-structured writing is very different from an oral exam the writing allows for restructuring your thoughts and ideas as you go and allows for far more depth.

I don't think, for most folks, that they could have as much depth in an F2F as they could in their writing with the exception of true experts in their fields.

The written essay has a cohesiveness and a structure to it that provides a better framework for evaluation and conveyance of information.

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

#483
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.

Perhaps. Can’t afford books and friend trips, spending on buggy AI scanners.

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

#484

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…

Students who use the "word of the week" can easily explain it by saying they used an AI in their studies.

"You asked us to write an essay on the Civil War. The first thing I did was ask an AI to explain it to me, and I asked the AI some follow-up questions. Then I did some research using other sources and wrote my paper."

It might even be a true story, and in such a case it's not surprising that the student would repeat words they encountered while studying.

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

#485

FWIW, I'm a consultant for a large University hospital, and Dutch. My PhD thesis, years ago, got the remark: "Should have checked with a native speaker." So, now I use ChatGPT to check my English. I just write what I want to write than ask it to make my text more "More concise, business-like and not so American" (yeah the thing is by default as ultra enthusiastic as an American waiter). And 9 out of 10 times it says…

When I was a junior in high school, the Advanced English teacher was also the AP English teacher. All the juniors had to write a term paper, and she had the seniors in the AP class give our papers' first draft a once over and give notes.

Both classes got a lesson, from either end, essentially for free (for the teacher). And it really helped. The next year I got to do the same. Of note was that this was back in the day when computers were relatively rare and typing was a skill that was specially taught, so most of the papers were written longhand for the first draft.

It's long been said that if you really want to learn a subject you should teach it. This sort of give-and-take works well, and it is more or less how the rest of society works. Using AI for this would be quite similar, but I think having another human is better. An AI will never stop you in the hall and say "dude, your paper, I got totally lost in the middle section, what the hell," but sometimes that's quite helpful.

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

#486
post #330
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…

Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. It was always a cost saving measure because allocating 30min face to face time with each individual student for each class is such a gigantic cost for the institution that they cannot even imagine doing it. Think about that the next time you look at your student debt, it couldn’t even buy you 30min time per class individually with the teacher…

> Instead you had to waste more time

I'm not so sure that writing takes more time than studying. For starters, you don't have to memorize anything, and you can limit yourself to the assigned topic.

Of course, it can be that students don't take studying for an oral exam seriously, and trust the teacher to only ask superficial questions.

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

#487
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying where, but well before transformers were invented, I saw an iOS project that had huge chunks of uncompiled Symbian code in the project "for reference", an entire pantheon of God classes, entire files duplicated rather than changing access modifiers, 1000 lines inside an always true if block, and 20% of the 120,000 lines were: // And no, those were not generally followed by a real comment.

And yet, I have an unfortunately clear mental picture of the human that did this. In itself, that is a very specific coding style. I don't imagine an LLM would do that. Chat would instead take a couple of the methods from the Symbian codebase and use them where they didn't exist. The God classes would merely be mined for more non-existent functions. The true if block would become a function. And the # lines would hav…

Depends on the LLM.

I've seen exactly what you describe and worse *, and I've also seen them keep to one style until I got bored of prompting for new features to add to the project.

* one standard test I have is "make a tetris game as a single page web app", and one model started wrong and then suddenly flipped from Tetris in html/js to ML in python.

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

#488
post #475

One of my kid's teachers sent out a warning to students that all essays would be checked with AI detection software and the repercussions one would face if caught. A classmate did an AI check on the teacher's warning and it came back positive for having been AI-generated.

Hah, that’s great! Hopefully this dramatic chapter in history is a short one, and we learn to adapt away from graded homework. A 4% false positive rate is insane when that could mean failure and/or expulsion, and even more so when any serious cheater can get around in two minutes with a “write in the style of…” preprompt.

> Hopefully this dramatic chapter in history is a short one

Doubtful. This is a new sector/era in the cat-v-mouse game.

> we learn to adapt away from graded homework.

Nothing proposed as an alternative scales well and - ironically - it's likely that something _like_ an LLM will be used to evaluate pupil quality / progress over time.

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

#489
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essays are async and easier to delegate.

If I'm paying 30k$/yr the professor is damn well reading my essay. If they don't want to teach & grade, they can get a pure research position. Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.

Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.

Where do you get this from? The people I know with pure research positions get paid basically the same (after correcting for 'rank' and seniority) as those who split their time between research and teaching.

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