Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 91 posts

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

#61

Post by apatheticonion »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #52

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 wh…

It's a huge problem. I have several friends in university who have had assignments flagged as AI. They have had entire units failed and forced to retake semesters which is not cheap.

Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs.

> 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

Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.

One friend now uses a dashcam to record themselves when writing an assignment so they can prove no AI was used when they are eventually flagged.

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

#62

Post by Tade0 »

Rexxar wrote: post #47
OsamaJaber wrote: post #10

AI detectors punishing non native English speakers for writing too cleanly is the part nobody talks about enough -_-

For example, native English speakers often make phonetic spelling errors (such as its/it’s, your/you’re) that non-native English speakers usually avoid. It’s probably a sign that someone speaks more fluently when he starts making these types of mistakes from time to time.

Or picked up English before they learned to read and write properly.

I'm cursed with this as I was put in an international environment right before turning five, went back to my home country to start grade school and only in fifth grade started having English classes.

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

#63

Post by kbelder »

tgrowazay wrote: post #8

Everyone knows about emdashes, but there are so much more! Here is a wiki article with all common tell-tales of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

My fear is people will actually take that article to heart, and begin accusing people of posting AI simply for using all sorts of completely valid phrases in their writing. None of those AI tells originated with AI.

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

#65

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

apatheticonion wrote: post #61
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #52

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 wh…

It's a huge problem. I have several friends in university who have had assignments flagged as AI. They have had entire units failed and forced to retake semesters which is not cheap. Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs. > put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning…

Yeah bad choice of words on my part, I apologize. I can imagine that things are pretty chaotic right now and that there are quite a few problems like the one you describe. When I said I don't see a crisis here I meant that more in a more overarching sense and that I see this as solvable.

> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees.

I don't know about that. I can't speak for the US, but at the university where I got my degrees (Math & CS) and later worked prerequisite in-person tests to be allowed to take a given exam were not rare. Most modules had lectures (professor), tutorials (voluntary in-person bonus exercises and tutors to ask questions) and exercise groups where solutions to mandatory exercises were discussed. In the latter sometimes an additional part of the exam requirements was to present and explain a solution at least once or twice over the course of the semester. And some had small, mandatory bi-weekly tests as part of the requirement too.

Obviously I can understand that this would not work equally well in each kind of academic programme.

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

#66

Post by zkmon »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #51
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 kno…

> 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..

Exactly. If the calculator knows what to do and how to do, you just need to be able to specify a high level goal, instead of worrying about whether to add or multiply.

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

#67

Post by zkmon »

kyykky wrote: post #36
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…

Teaching is about moving our knowledge (the stuff we’ve collectively learned ourselves, from others and our parents [instead of everyone needing to find out on their own]) to the next generation. While some skills may become obsolete in some parts of professional life due to AI, the purpose of academia does not change much.

> the purpose of academia does not change much.

The purpose did change a lot. During Greeks time, purpose was pure knowledge or geometer skills. Industrial revolution and office work changed the purpose of the education to produce clerical staff. With AI, the purpose changes again. You need skills in using the AI and devices.

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

#68

Post by zkmon »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #57
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 Ga…

> What value then will they bring to the table to justify their pay?

They are skillful in shepherding a population of AI agents towards goals.

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

#69

Post by the_fall »

smrtinsert wrote: post #58
the_fall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more complex than that. It's called SynthID-text and biases the probabilities of token generation in a way that can be recovered down the line.

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

#70

Post by hazbot »

smoyer wrote: post #26
HeavyStorm wrote: post #17

This ship has sailed. It's how it was with the internet. I grew up in the 90s, and teacher didn't know how to deal with the fact we no longer had to go through multiple books in the library to get the information they needed. We barely needed to write it. Now nobody expects students to not use the internet. Same here: teachers must accept that AI can and will write papers and answer questions / do homework. How you t…

When I was in high school, we were not allowed to use calculator for most science classes ... And certainly not for math class. I'm ten years, will you want to hire a student who is coming out of college without considerable experience and practice with AI?

Yes, it is much easier to train someone to use AI than to train them to have sufficiently baked-in math and language skills to be able to leverage the AI.
Post reply on HN