There's an exceedingly simple way of doing this that's pretty much bullet proof: Just check the given text against the database of stored generations (which they no doubt keep) and you'll have a pretty much perfect result.
Logistically, searching untold terabytes of text might be challenging but to say there's fundamental difficulties is just not accurate imo.
OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
261–270 of 292 posts
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why even care if it is written by a machine or not? I am not sure it matters as much as people think.
Well, I teach English as a second language in a non-English speaking country. I often used short essays and diary-writing for homework. The students have had lots of English input over the years, but not much experience with output. So, writing assignments work out very well for them. Alas, with ChatGPT on the rise here, they no longer have to write it themselves. The upshot of which is, the useful writing assignment…
> Well, I teach English as a second language in a non-English speaking country. I often used short essays and diary-writing for homework. The students have had lots of English input over the years, but not much experience with output. So, writing assignments work out very well for them. Alas, with ChatGPT on the rise here, they no longer have to write it themselves.
If your students want to betray themselves of the possible learning opportunities of attempting to formulate the sentences by themselves in English, it is their problem.
The same holds in mathematics (degree course): of course, in the first semesters, you can use a computer algebra system like Maple or Mathematica for computing the integrals on your exercise sheets, but you will betray yourself of the practice of computing integrals that these exercise sheets are supposed to teach you.
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the whole problem with LLMs in general. They are designed to be convincing, not necessarily accurate.
Lots of human discourse is that way too. The LLMs just learned it from us.
Whether true or not is irrelevant to this discssion, we're discussing problems with AI tooling, which, can generate highly convincing like 100000x faster than you.
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#264Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#265Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "should NOT be used to accused someone of academic misconduct unless the tool meets a very robust quality standard." Meanwhile, the leading commercial tools for plagiarism detection often flag properly cited/annotated quotes from sources in your text as plagiarism.
That sounds like a less serious problem—if the tool highlights the allegedly plagarized sections, at worst the author can conclusively prove it false with no additional research (though that burden should instead be on the tool’s user, of course). So it’s at least possible to use the tool to get meaningful results. On the other hand, an opaque LLM detector that just prints “that was from an LLM, methinks” (and not e.…
I agree. Just noting the bar is very low for these tools, which may have set low expectations.
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#267This tool's been fueling tons of false accusations in academia. Wife is doing her PhD and she often tells me stories about professors falsely accusing students of using ChatGPT.
whats funny is GPT output with even a relatively low temp will come back as human more reliably than human content.
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a strawman. First, the AI detection algorithms can't offer anything close to 99.9%. Second, your scenario doesn't analyze another human and issue judgement, as the AI detection algorithms do. When a human is miscategorized as a bot, they could find themselves in front of academic fraud boards, skipped over by recruiters, placed in the spam folder, etc.
> Second, your scenario doesn't analyze another human and issue judgement, as the AI detection algorithms do. > When a human is miscategorized as a bot, they could find themselves in front of academic fraud boards, skipped over by recruiters, placed in the spam folder, etc. Is the problem here the algorithms or how people choose to use them? There’s a big difference between treating the results of an AI algorithm as…
That's exactly why the stock analogy doesn't work. People don't buy algorithms, they buy products - such as detectors or predictors. You necessarily have to sell judgement alongside the algorithm. So debating the merits of an algorithm in a vacuum, when the issue being raised is the human harm caused by detector products, is the strawman.
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second, your scenario doesn't analyze another human and issue judgement, as the AI detection algorithms do. > When a human is miscategorized as a bot, they could find themselves in front of academic fraud boards, skipped over by recruiters, placed in the spam folder, etc. Is the problem here the algorithms or how people choose to use them? There’s a big difference between treating the results of an AI algorithm as…
That's exactly why the stock analogy doesn't work. People don't buy algorithms, they buy products - such as detectors or predictors. You necessarily have to sell judgement alongside the algorithm. So debating the merits of an algorithm in a vacuum, when the issue being raised is the human harm caused by detector products, is the strawman.
> People don't buy algorithms, they buy products - such as detectors or predictors. You necessarily have to sell judgement alongside the algorithm.
Two people can buy the same product yet use it in very different ways: some educators take the output of anti-cheating software with a grain of salt, others treat it as infallible gospel.
Neither approach is determined by the product design in itself, rather by the broader business context (sales, marketing, education, training, implementation), and even factors entirely external to the vendor (differences in professional culture among educational institutions/systems).
Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your objective that your students learn, or to police them? In the latter case, yes, you have those two options you mentioned. In the former case, you can just continue as you were. Some will cheat and some will not. The ones who do are only cheating themselves.
My goal is for them to learn. And yes, I can just carry on, and some will cheat. I've caught cheaters in the past, of course, but they were far and few between. With ChatGPT and even improved translators like DeepL, it's hard to get them to do the practice they need to learn. And as a teacher who really WANTS them to learn and to get that feeling, "Hey, I can actually do this!", it's depressing to think of the one wh…
Just tell them, "the point of this exercise is for you to practice writing in English, not for me to grade you. If you use ChatGPT to do it for you I won't be able to notice, but it will be pointless. It's better if you don't do it at all than if you do that."