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Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

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Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#51

Post by Espressosaurus »

zkmon wrote: post #24

Teachers are also heavy users of AI. Entire academic business staff is using AI. The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls. The academic industry need to redefi…

A calculator is more consistent and faster at calculating than I am, but I still need to understand how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract before I can move on to more complicated math. I need to intuitively understand when I'm getting a garbage result because I did an operation wrong, moved a decimal place by accident, or other problem.

Memorization has a place, and is a requirement for having a large enough knowledge base that you can start synthesizing from different sources and determining when one source is saying something that is contradicted by what should be common knowledge.

Unless your vision of the future is the humans in WALL-E sitting in chairs while watching screens without ever producing anything, you should care about education.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#52

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

I don't see the whole AI topic as a large crisis, as others have mentioned: put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them, give them the freedom to so, but if as a result they fail the exams and similar in-person evaluations, then so be it. Let them fail.

I would like to hire students who actually have skills and know their material. Or even better, if AI is actually the amazing learning tool many claim then it should enhance their learning and as a result help them succeed in tests without any AI assistance. If they can't, then clearly AI was a detriment to them and their learning and they lack the ability to think critically about their own abilities.

If everyone is supposed to use AI anyway, why should I ever prefer a candidate who is not able to do anything without AI assistance over someone who can? And if you hold the actual opinion that proper ai-independent knowledge is not required, then why should I hire a student at all instead of buying software solutions from AI companies (and maybe put a random person without a relevant degree in front of it)?

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#53

Post by analog31 »

meroes wrote: post #45
bambax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This "problem" is really easy to fix with in person exams and no computers in class, ever.

This is the “back to office” of education. It is not a one size fits all solution. There are so many remote and hybrid classes now you guys sound outdated.

That’s fair, but at the same time, expecting any learning to occur in remote classes, when fair evaluation is impossible, may also be outdated.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#54

Post by gotrythis »

I put a day of careful thought into writing a cover letter for a job a few weeks ago. Knowing there is there was the potential of AI screening, I checked if it would get flagged.

Every detection program I tried said the letter that I personally wrote by hand was 100% AI generated!

So, I looked for humanizer programs and ran my cover letter through a couple. Without the results in front of me at the moment, I can only revert to my judgemental conclusion instead of solid observations...

You need to write like an idiot to pass AI detection algorithms. The rewritten cover letter was awful, unprofessional, and embarrassing.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#55

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bambax wrote: post #41
threemux wrote: post #34

In person, proctored blue book exams are back! Sharpen those pencils kids. I've been wondering lately if one of the good things to come out of heavy LLM use will be a return to mostly in-person interactions once nothing that happens online is trustworthy anymore.

Yes! This "problem" is really easy to fix with in person exams and no computers in class, ever.

Until they need to start learning how to use them to get a job in the modern world?

There should be a class that teaches you how to use AI to get things done, especially judging on how many even on HN admit they aren’t good at it.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#56

Post by kbelder »

analog31 wrote: post #53
meroes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the “back to office” of education. It is not a one size fits all solution. There are so many remote and hybrid classes now you guys sound outdated.

That’s fair, but at the same time, expecting any learning to occur in remote classes, when fair evaluation is impossible, may also be outdated.

Learning is just as easy remote and with AI, maybe easier. It's testing and evaluation of that learning that's difficult.

Universities make money not by teaching, but by testing and certifying. That's why AI is so disruptive in that space.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#57

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

zkmon wrote: post #24

Teachers are also heavy users of AI. Entire academic business staff is using AI. The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls. The academic industry need to redefi…

> "Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans."

I'm fascinated by these claims from some LLM advocates that people will no longer need to know things, think, or express themselves properly. What value then will such individuals bring to the table to justify their pay? Will they be like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest whose sole function was to repeat what the computer says verbatim? Will they be like Tom Smykowski in Office Space indignantly saying "I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that?!" Somebody, please explain.

[EDIT] The other funny aspect about these claims is, given that such an individual's skills are mainly in using an AI, that they can simply be outspent by their peers on AI usage. "Wally got the job instead of me because he paid for a premium LLM to massage his application and I could only afford the basic one because I'm short on money."

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#58

Post by smrtinsert »

the_fall wrote: post #5
ashleyn wrote: post #2

I'm guessing this "humanizer" actually does two things: * grep to remove em dashes and emojis * re-run through another llm with a prompt to remove excessive sycophantry and invalid url citations

No. No one is looking for em-dashes, except for some bozos on the internet. The "default voice" of all mainstream LLMs can be easily detected by looking at the statistical distribution of word / token sequences. AI detector tools work and have very low false negatives. They have some small percentage of false positives because a small percentage of humans pick up the same writing habits, but that's not relevant here.…

providers are also adding hidden characters and attempting to watermark if memory serves.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#59

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ethin wrote: post #49
idiotsecant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just about the worst possible response it seems. It manages to probably hurt some wrists not used to long handwriting sessions, completely avoid learning how to use and attribute AI responsibly, and still probably just results in kids handwriting AI generated slop, anyway.

It also disadvantages people with disabilities. How exactly are they supposed to do these papers and tests? Dictate everything to someone else, using Blindness as an example? Because that seems very very inefficient and extremely error-prone.

As someone with an actual visual impairment, please do not attempt to use my affliction to justify generalized use of AI. Educational assistance for those with disabilities is not a new thing; AI is likely going to have a role but how remains exactly to be seen.

Re: Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI

#60

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #27
jurgenaut23 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used em dashes heavily 15 years ago when writing my PhD thesis.

So did every author of classic literature. People who think they can spot AI writing by simple stylistic indicators alone are fooling themselves and hurting real human authors

It's because LLMs were trained on classic literature that they began to use em-dashes in their now-famous manner.

Seriously, highbrow literature is heavily weighted in their training data. (But the rest is Reddit, etc.) This really explains a lot, I think.

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