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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

#841

Post by ben_w »

ookdatnog wrote: post #259
ben_w wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now. My current best guess, is to hand the student stuff that was written by an LLM, and challenge them to find and correct its mistakes. That's going to be what they do in their careers, unless the LLMs get so good they don't need to, in which case https://xkcd.com/810/ applies. > Personally I think all this is unpredictable and destabilizing. If t…

> My current best guess, is to hand the student stuff that was written by an LLM, and challenge them to find and correct its mistakes. Finding errors in a text is a useful exercise, but clearly a huge step down in terms of cognitive challenge from producing a high quality text from scratch. This isn't so much an alternative as it is just giving up on giving students intellectually challenging work. > That's going to…

> Finding errors in a text is a useful exercise, but clearly a huge step down in terms of cognitive challenge from producing a high quality text from scratch.

I disagree.

I've been writing a novel now for… far too long, now. Trouble is, whenever I read it back, I don't like what I've done.

I could totally just ask an LLM to write one for me, but the hard part is figuring out what parts of those 109,000 words of mine sucked, much more so than writing them.

(I can also ask an LLM to copyedit for me, but that only goes so far before it gets confused and starts trying to tell me about something wildly different).

> It's not easy to identify which "useless" skills are still useful as to learn as cognitive training

Indeed. And you may also be correct that writing is one such skill even if only just to get the most out of an LLM.

What I'm describing here is very much a best guess from minimal evidence and the current situation; I would easily drop it for another idea if I saw even very minimal evidence for a better solution.

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

#842

Post by j_maffe »

bluGill wrote: post #472
jack_pp wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the teacher knows you either way so the bias would be there for the written exam as well

In a written exam they can cover the names - give you a random number as you enter the room and you write that on the paper, and but your name and number on a different paper. You also need to type everything out on a computer with spell check. (and even then if you write bucket or pail will identify you but it is unlikely any professor knows you well enough to tell those) When you audition for a symphony you perform…

If you can't trust a professor to professionally and impartially grade someone's work, the system would likely collapse. This is not to say that there hasn't been cases where professors have been shown to be biased, there has. But the premise of universities is to give professors some autonomy in the way they teach and evaluate students.

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

#843

Post by skhunted »

hungariantoast wrote: post #821
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…

> 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. If all my math professors had done this, I never would have earned my computer science degree or my minor in mathematics. I have an immensely difficult time memorizing formulas and doing math by hand. I absolutely need to be able to prepare notes ahead of time, and reference them,…

One should not memorize in mathematics at the college level. If you understand you don’t need to memorize anything. The memorization that should occur is when you remember certain facts because you’ve done enough problems that your brain “just knows” them.

Anytime students are allowed technology there is massive amounts of cheating. Knowing a certain body of knowledge off the top of your head is important in all areas of study.

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

#845

Post by bane »

I think the only way around this problem is one we can borrow from the demoscene art competitions: show your work.

In the demoscene, still graphics competitions, at least as far as I remember, most organizers defend against cheating by requiring the artists to capture snapshots of their work over time to show that they didn't:

1) steal other people's graphics

2) just use some kind of tool to convert a photo or rework somebody else's work

During the presentation of the works for voting, all of the stages are typically displayed for the crowd.

This works today because AI tools typically don't output any intermediate steps, and if they do they don't look anything like what a human would produce.

This works for most educational assignments as well.

Heck, in fields where Microsoft Word is an option, Sharepoint preserves the change history and it's a pretty simply matter to just review that history to show progression, edits over time, and all the other elements you might think of to show that the student actually wrote the document themselves. It also helps frustrate people who might just copy-paste dump other work into the document. The teacher doesn't need to review or grade ever single revision, just have it all accessible.

Two other practical examples of where this has worked:

1) In university all of my mathematics professors required us to "show our work", which helped with partial credit in cases we arrived at the wrong answer, but also defeated the use of advanced symbolic systems that simply barfed out the answer.

2) At work I had an issue with an employee who I suspected was claiming other people's work. He had a role that was supposed to be reviewing and editing their documents so it was difficult to prove. However, a review of Sharepoint's edit history for multiple documents showed no edits made by him on several major documents. This sparked an inquiry to ensure he wasn't using some alternative method, and the rest of was simple to deal with HR.

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

#846

Post by dudu24 »

jerf wrote: post #461
mikeyinternews wrote: post #458

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.

The default tone of ChatGPT and the default tone of school or academic writing (at all levels) are not exactly the same, but in the grand vector space of such things, they are awfully close to each other. And all the LLMs have presumably already been fed with an awful lot of this sort writing, too. It's not a surprise that a by-the-numbers report, either in high school or college, of the sort that generally ought to…

> grand vector space

what.

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

#847

Post by oakashes »

jack_pp wrote: post #450
bigfudge wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There are small question about bias (gender, race) etc in these oral systems, but I think they are resolvable and much better than written essays (which are now written by AI).

the teacher knows you either way so the bias would be there for the written exam as well

True but I think there's still an element of falsifiability to a teacher's evaluation of an essay that doesn't exist in an oral exam or interactive discussion. An essay is an artifact and if a teacher is giving student A worse grades than student B, a third party can look at that artifact to see whether it's remotely reasonable. A 1:1 discussion or an oral defense is much more subjective.

Not saying this is a fatal flaw, but there is a bit of a tradeoff there.

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

#848

Post by schlauerfox »

nostrademons wrote: post #541
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…

The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't. ...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes)…

sociopathy isn't intelligence. Power is what enables these abuses.

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

#849

Post by bluGill »

j_maffe wrote: post #842
bluGill wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a written exam they can cover the names - give you a random number as you enter the room and you write that on the paper, and but your name and number on a different paper. You also need to type everything out on a computer with spell check. (and even then if you write bucket or pail will identify you but it is unlikely any professor knows you well enough to tell those) When you audition for a symphony you perform…

If you can't trust a professor to professionally and impartially grade someone's work, the system would likely collapse. This is not to say that there hasn't been cases where professors have been shown to be biased, there has. But the premise of universities is to give professors some autonomy in the way they teach and evaluate students.

No system is 100% the question is are we good enough. As a white male I haven't seen many problems - but also because I'm in the group least likely to see one.

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

#850

Post by ckastner »

auggierose wrote: post #738
ckastner wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Quoting article 22 [1]: > The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing [...] [1]: https://gdpr.eu/article-22-automated-individual-decision-mak...

So if an automated decision happens, and the reviewer looks for a second at it, and says, good enough, that will be OK according to GDPR. Don't see what GDPR solves here.

> So if an automated decision happens, and the reviewer looks for a second at it, and says, good enough, that will be OK according to GDPR. Don't see what GDPR solves here.

The assumption is that a human review the conditions that led the automated system to make that decision.

I think it would be trivial to argue in court that rubberstamping some scalar value that a deep neural net or whatever spit out does not pass that bar. It's still the automated system's decision, the human is just parroting it.

Note that it's easier for the FAANGs to argue such a review has happened because they have massive amounts of heterogenous data where there's bound to be something that would be sufficient to argue with (like having posted something that offended someone).

But a single score? I'd say almost impossible to argue. One would have to demonstrate that the system is near-perfect, and virtually never makes mistakes.

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