Inside the university AI cheating crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#111

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 12:51 AM UTC

patrick451 wrote: post #91

marcus_holmes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause. Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations. Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". If we were to write an essay, we would use an LLM to do the actual writing, and feed it a set of bullet poi…

>Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.

I don't consider a video to be an essay, and yet it is perfectly capable of improving someone's writing and thinking.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#112

Post by me_me_me » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #107

me_me_me wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that even feasible? You can affect LLMs output by asking them to form response as some specific person with specific style. Apart some hidden secret sauce by the LLM provider, detection is always going to be an arms race.

> Is that even feasible? If you mean, is it feasible to empirically test the accuracy of detection software when the LLM output is so varied? That's an interesting question. Is there a way to create a representative sample of LLM output for testing purposes? That's an important question, not least because we'd also be able to define the distribution and range of outputs (unless there's a statistical way to create a s…

Well it all depends on how hard you want to cheat. If you know nothing about the topic you basically hack the format of the essay.

If you know something you can prompt to insert some errors into logic or different perspective. Effectively making it somewhat your work too

I don't think most common LLMs are deterministic. Especially if you work on the prompt. That is not just ask Write a synopsis of Romeo and Juliet.

Out of curiosity I tried following

> Write a synopsis of Romeo and Juliet > Rewrite it in style of a teenager, insert some slight grammar errors > Write in as if teenager was trying to sound formal > more formal > make a different take, more edgy and judgemental

I have no idea how one would combat that.

> Maybe we just work with a large collection of output.

yes, But how do you get that large collection from a single student who uses non-default prompts?

Though I wonder, are we not fighting kids using calculators in a math class?

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#113

Post by patrick451 » Sat, Dec 21, 2024, 1:24 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #111

patrick451 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.

I don't consider a video to be an essay, and yet it is perfectly capable of improving someone's writing and thinking.

I quoted the wrong part. I intended to respond to this claim

"Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations."