101–110 of 134 posts
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As long as that kind of egregious mistake is possible, we should look at such tools with suspicion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why should educational instutions care? Education is a business, students are the customers (or in countries with state-funded education, the government). If AI helps people graduate faster, that's more money to the institutions, less effort to the students, and nice statistics for the governments. At least in my country most degrees aren't worth much anyway, they just open you doors to internships where you real…
Governments paying for education don't just want graduations, they want an educated workforce, because there are benefits from having that. Instructors generally do not treat education like a business. On some level the institutions themselves often are business-like, but on the classroom level I don't think that's the case.
At least at our University, it is mostly a thinktank. We publish research and attend symposiums for research and are mostly motivated by the research. The teaching is a byproduct.
This is probably not the case at community colleges and smaller colleges that are mostly pumping out degrees. But large universities are mostly motivated by research and getting published. That is largely what motivates high quality professors to work there.
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Maybe, but I doubt it. Spyware-based systems are doomed to failure as other commenters note. There's nothing you can do to prove the text came from a human. Faking inputs is extremely easy. People will sell a $20 USB dongle that does appropriate keyboard/mouse things. Worst case, people can simply type in the AI generated essay by hand and/or crib from it directly. Schools are going to have to look at why take home w…
It's a cat-and-mouse game for sure. At the first level, any dongle that simply types the AI response through a fake HID device will be easy to detect. No real essay writer just types an entire document in one go, with no edits. They move paragraphs around, expand some, delete others, etc. So this dongle will have to convincingly start with a worse version that's too short (or too long!). It'll have to pipe the GPT ou…
I started to write how it would be possible to control for that, but it got too Orwellian/horrible and I stopped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why should educational instutions care? Education is a business, students are the customers (or in countries with state-funded education, the government). If AI helps people graduate faster, that's more money to the institutions, less effort to the students, and nice statistics for the governments. At least in my country most degrees aren't worth much anyway, they just open you doors to internships where you real…
Believe it or not, a lot of educational institutions really do care about actually educating their students and not just being diploma mills.
The consequence of these diploma mills are that they are now competitors to normal universities and have caused other universities to dilute their requirements and courses in order to compete against the diploma mills. In the end, we have regressed to the lowest common denominator, making the Bachelor Degree barely more respected than a high school diploma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they could move to a more British style, with in-person essays, proctored by human observers (not that there aren't old-fashioned ways to cheat on those too, but they're well-known).
Yes, when I had to take university entry exams in Brazil, all parts of the exam were in person, including writing the essay, with a mandatory topic only disclosed when the exam starts. Preventing ai cheating might become more difficult for educational projects that are long form, like writing a dissertation, or big coding challenges. Although, for coding, one thing that I have consistenly seen work, is to just ask st…
The work in writing a good dissertation is done prior to writing, the writing is just wrapping up. If you can write a good dissertation with AI, so much for the better.
Meanwhile, the work in writing a bad dissertation is never done at all and the dissertation is a more-or-less-undedectably plagiarized document read by at most two people (and perhaps noone, including the writer). This process is a waste of time and accelerating it with AI will change nothing other than saving a few hours for people who wanted a degree (and definitely would have gotten it without AI) without doing any research.
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Wouldn't it still be easier to type out the entire AI generated assignment than to come up with an assignment and then type out the assignment you came up with yourself?
Obviously typing from start to finish with few edits is also a "failed" result in such a program. Someone actually writing an essay should be creating structure, taking notes, rearranging paragraphs etc. Then again you have a good point. Often you blat out an essay and then edit it. Same thing goes with typing in an AI generated template.
I hear ya, but I wonder if there are people who have the proper mental organization to write a well-organized coherent essay in one shot.
I'm not one of those people, but I assume they exist. And I assume they would be unfairly penalized with such a system.
That being said, I think we are going to end up in a world where we are all communicating with each other via ChatGPT (or whatever succeeds it).
ChatGPT will be our "Lingua Franca" as well as our "Mens communis" (I got that by asking ChatGPT). Strange times ...
* edits for clarity: ha!
IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole essays, or if someone is actuall…
This seems so backwards to me. If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology? Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools, and then raise the…
Just because a machine can generate an essay of questionable quality with a fair chance of containing hallucinations making it unusable for many fields of human endeavor doesn't mean that writing is no longer a useful pedagogical tool. Learning to write is a part of learning to think.
IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole essays, or if someone is actuall…
Maybe, but I doubt it. Spyware-based systems are doomed to failure as other commenters note. There's nothing you can do to prove the text came from a human. Faking inputs is extremely easy. People will sell a $20 USB dongle that does appropriate keyboard/mouse things. Worst case, people can simply type in the AI generated essay by hand and/or crib from it directly. Schools are going to have to look at why take home w…
Which would be a huge benefit for the overall quality of education. A lot of student can write a passable essay in a word processor with spell check and tutors... but those same students sometimes have absolutely no idea what they've written. Group assignments has taught me this many times over.
IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole essays, or if someone is actuall…
This seems so backwards to me. If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology? Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools, and then raise the…
That's the theory, anyway. In practice students learn that "really thinking for themselves" in essays is usually not rewarded while paraphrasing some reading assignments with some sprinkled quotations works much better and is less work than thinking about topics they don't care about.
Maybe the AI stuff will lead to practice better approximating the theoretical goal.
To prove authenticity, be politically incorrect in a way AI never would. You'll be dismissed, canceled and fired, but at least authentically so.
They stick out like a sore thumb in spring 2023.
It flew under the radar more when everyone was short-tempered, say winter 2021.
The people who are still stuck on it and in their own heads seem to have a __negative__ herding effect. There's a seed of irrationality that drives some, and as there's fewer, they stick out more, making it more grating and driving more people away.