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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

#511

Post by BubbleRings »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #481
BubbleRings wrote: post #466

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 ut…

Agree with you fully. If I was a teacher, I think I'd be constantly in trouble for failing students.

I work in a field where I _think_ that clarity of communication is critically important. But then I see people that can't read or write worth a damn getting promotions and the like, and I think, maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon.

To others (not you ToucanLoucan): If you are reading this and you are wondering how you can become the person who doesn't send the email that is taken to mean "turn the server off now" when what you meant to say was "turn the server on now", all you really need to learn is to fully proof read your messages before you click send, in my opinion. And to write as much as you can. Everything else will take care of itself; you will naturally get better and better at it.

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

#512

Post by red_admiral »

VancouverMan wrote: post #495
red_admiral wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're building a system to proctor students, then part of your job is to get it to work under all reasonable real-world conditions you might encounter: low light, students with standard webcams or just the one built into their laptop, students with darker skin etc. Reality might make this harder for some cases, but solving that is what you are being paid for. Also, this could have been handled much better in the…

The last time I got an ID photo taken, I got to wait and watch as the dark-skinned Indian photographer repeatedly struggled to take a suitable passport photo of the light-skinned white woman who was in line directly ahead of me. This was at a long-established mall shop that specialized in photography products and services. The same photographer had taken suitable photos of some other people in line ahead of us rather…

I think this comes down to there being different definitions of racism, that are sometimes flat out contradictory.

I don't think anyone is saying that the universities or the software companies have some kind of secret agenda to keep black people out. As far as I can tell there's good evidence they're mostly trying to get more black people in (and in some cases to keep Asians out, but that's another story). I also don't think anyone here was acting out of fear or hatred of black people.

What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects. It is quite likely that whatever model-training and testing the software companies did, was mostly on fair-skinned people in well-lit environments, otherwise they would have picked up this problem earlier on. This is not super-woke Ibram X Kendi applied antiracism, this is doing your job properly to make sure your product works for all students, especially as the students don't have any choice to opt out of using the proctoring software beyond quitting their college.

To me it's on the same level as having a SQL injection vulnerability: maybe you didn't intend to get your users' data exposed - about 100% of the time when this happens, the company involved very much did not intend to have a data breach - but it happened anyway, you were incompetent at the job and your users are now dealing with the consequences.

And to the extent that those consequences here fall disproportionately on skin colors (and so, by correlation, on ethnicities) that have historically been disadvantaged, calling this a type of racism seems appropriate. It's very much not the KKK type of racism, but it could very well still meet legal standards for discrimination.

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

#513

Post by Wheatman »

bearjaws wrote: post #469
cfcf14 wrote: post #143

AI detectors do not work. I have spoken with many people who think that the particular writing style of commercial LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) is the result of some intrinsic characteristic of LLMs - either the data or the architecture. The belief is that this particular tone of 'voice' (chirpy sycophant), textual structure (bullet lists and verbosity), and vocab ('delve', et al) serves and and will continue to se…

I recently deployed an AI detector for a large K12 platform (multi-state 20k+ students), and they DO work in the sense of saving teachers time. You have to understand, you are a smart professional individual who will try to avoid being detected, but 6-12th grade students can be incredibly lazy and procrastinate. You may take the time to add a tone, style and cadence to your prompt but many students do not. They can b…

Doesnt google docs have a feature that shows writing history.

You could ask the student to start wrkting on google docs, and whenever someone gets a false positive, they can prove they wrote it through that.

And Besides 99% of people who use AI to write, dont bother claiming it as a false positive, so giving students the right to contest that claim would not be that much if a problem long term.

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

#514

Post by tomjen3 »

junaru wrote: post #351
lm28469 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France my essays were written in class, no phones, no book, just your brain, a sheet a paper and a pen. That's still 100% doable today

It even came with handwriting built in as authentication mechanism! AI detectors hate this secret! On a more serious note - US removed cursive from their curriculum almost two decades ago - something i cant wrap my head around as cursive is something the rest of the world(?) uses starting in middle school and onwards through the whole adult life.

Dane here. We don't write things in cursive. Sure we were thought cursive in school (my only remedial class! What a waste of time), but we write on computers. Very occasionally we might need to write up a sign or something.

I did nearly all my exams on a computer.

At one point the best writing tool was the fountain pen. It was a great invention and it had an appropriate script: cursive, which was the natural thing to do given how the ink flowed.

However kids are messy and you really want them to use pencils because they don't have flowing ink. The reason for cursive in the first place was the flowing ink, so when we switched away from flowing ink, there was no reason to write in cursive.

Except of course to waste the only resource everybody agrees is okay to waste: kids time.

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

#515

Post by SkyBelow »

skhunted wrote: post #491

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

>If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

Isn't it to either do that now, or to lose the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge.

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

#516

Post by bearjaws »

fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #395

If AI detection cannot be 100% accurate, I do not believe it is an appropriate solution for judging the futures of millions of students and young people. Time to move on. Either from the tech or from the essay format. In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.

Plagiarism detectors aren't 100% accurate either, and we have to use those as well.

Institutions have to enforce rules around these things, if they do not within 10 years their degrees will be pointless.

It's what happens when you believe someone to have cheated that matters. If it's not blatant cheating, then you cannot punish them for it. These tools exist to catch only the worst offenders.

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

#517

Post by smartmic »

_heimdall wrote: post #372
smartmic wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let me try to be more precise. By "evaluate", I mean using an AI to make predictions about human behavior , either retrospectively (as is the case here in trying to make an accusation of cheating) or prospectively (i.e. automating criminal justice). Even if you could collect all the parameters (features?) that make up a human being, there is the randomness in humans and in nature in general, which simply destro…

This feels like an argument bigger than AI evaluations. All points you raised could very well be issues with humans evaluating other humans to attempt to predict future outcomes.

They are not wrong. And the art of predicting future outcomes proves to be difficult and fraught with failure. But human evaluation of other humans is more like an open level field to me. A human is accountable for what he or she says or predicts about others, subject to interrogation or social or legal consequences. Not so easy with AI, because it steps out of all these areas - at least many actors using AI do not seem to stay responsible and take on all these mistakes.

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

#518

Post by baby_souffle »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #343
mrweasel wrote: post #184

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…

Surely you understand how any algorithm (regardless of its nature) that gives the cheater the list of reasons why it spotted cheating will only work for a single iteration before the cheaters adapt, right?

> Surely you understand how any algorithm (regardless of its nature) that gives the cheater the list of reasons why it spotted cheating will only work for a single iteration before the cheaters adapt, right?

This happens anyways, though? Any service that's useful for alternative / shady / illicit purposes is part of a cat/mouse game. Even if you don't tell the $badActors what you're looking for, they'll learn soon enough what you're not looking for just by virtue of their exploitative behavior still working.

I'm a little skeptical of any "we fight bad guys!" effort that can be completely tanked by telling the bad guys how they got caught.

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

#519

Post by jeroenhd »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #459
fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #395

If AI detection cannot be 100% accurate, I do not believe it is an appropriate solution for judging the futures of millions of students and young people. Time to move on. Either from the tech or from the essay format. In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41882421 My comment from a few days ago. The origin was a conversation with a girl who said she'd been pulled into a professor's office and told she was going to be reported to whatever her university's equivalent of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity is over using AI - a matter of academic honesty. The professor made it clear in the syllabus that "no AI" was allowed to be use…

In my opinion, it strongly depends on what Grammarly is being used for. For a physics paper, that's not a huge problem. For an English writing assignment, that's cheating. Banning AI tools like Grammarly for both is probably the best solution as your physics paper now becomes an extra training exercise for your English paper.

Writing essays isn't just about your ideas. It's also a tool to teach communication skills. The goal of an essay isn't to produce a readable paper, until you start your PhD at least; it's to teach a variety of skills.

I don't really care about the AI generated spam that fills the corporate world because corporate reports are write-only anyway, but you can't apply what may be tolerated in the professional world to the world of education.

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

#520

Post by max51 »

llmthrow102 wrote: post #186
thih9 wrote: 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.

I saw a lot of unbelievably bad code when I was teaching in university. I doubt that my undergrad students who couldn't code had access to LLMs in 2011.
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