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> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…
Highly recommend testing this new cheating tool out by entering a custom prompt at https://talktotransformer.com/ (which uses GPT-2) and reading what the AI generates for your custom essay snippet. A single sentence with a euphemism should suffice... "I" was able to create some hilarious franken-stories. Anyone care to share their greatest hits?
1) Copy some text to be plagiarized.
2) Feed text to AI so it's rephrased.
3) Present result as own work.
> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…
> Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. Case in point-- no one plays chess anymore.
(It's possible I just took a joke too seriously, but "chess is dead" is a common and incorrect take.)
Highly recommend testing this new cheating tool out by entering a custom prompt at https://talktotransformer.com/ (which uses GPT-2) and reading what the AI generates for your custom essay snippet. A single sentence with a euphemism should suffice... "I" was able to create some hilarious franken-stories. Anyone care to share their greatest hits?
On the other hand, I get interesting responses if I instead provide it with the first two sentences of an answer to a prompt. I tried "I was only eleven years old when he died. I started playing soccer and it made me who I am today." and got:
"He died from complications of chronic renal failure. It's just a really, really bad way to die.
You think about that. You're talking to a kid who just died from a medical issue that was preventable, if not treatable. And you think about the kids who die on the soccer field, all over this country, and you think about how that's not OK."
It's not going to fool anyone, but it's a big step up from anything I've seen before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.
This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.
> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a human or an algorithm? Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time. However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem is that universities have re…
This could turn into a pretty interesting arms race with surprising privacy considerations. For example, the AI might require writing samples from the student under consideration from K-12 in order to get sufficient accuracy..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.
Am a university professor who frequently assigns essays, so this is something I've been thinking a lot about. The problem is not that AI can successfully write a college-level essay (maybe someday, but certainly GPT-2 isn't even close to that level yet). It's that something along the lines of GPT-2 can emulate the superficial appearance of an essay. The actual facts, quotes, and references it generates are generally…
This raises an interesting point, which is that there seems to be a relationship between essay-writing and essay-reading. The students are able to cheat on essay-writing because the school is already cheating on essay-reading.
If we reach a point where essay-writing is unnecessary because it can be done by machine, it's a safe bet that essay-reading will also be done by machine. What will be the point of writing me an essay, if it's just a function of a prompt? Why not just send me the prompt?
Then professors will start to teach and assign the writing of prompts for essay-writing machines. "Write a prompt in less than 25 words that persuades analog31 to approve your project." And someone will come up with a prompt-writing machine, and a prompt-reading machine.
The article quotes Miles Brundage: “If it is not being used in an illicit fashion, A.I. can be a boon for generating larger, more ambitious, more creative text documents — similar to how calculators have been used to help develop the skills we want to be teaching.” and it continues: Calculators have spared maths and science students the laborious pain of long calculations and allowed for more advanced syllabuses, des…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students could just be required to write the essays in class rather than as take-home assignments. Also, if there's a great discrepancy in style, skill, or content of in-class essays vs take-home essays, then that could be considered evidence of cheating.
This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.
If the student gets the AI to do it, so be it. You'll get useless feedback and then you'll have to sit in a room and do it for real in the final exam - maybe you didn't need the practice, or maybe you'll wish you didn't waste your chances.