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It Wasn't AI

itwasntai.com

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Re: It Wasn't AI

#51

Post by jandrese »

valine wrote: post #33
jandrese wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in college we had a number of group projects and I thought the whole time that it would make a ton of sense for the professor to set up a class repo (I'm a old person so they would be a CVS repo at the time) and be able to see exactly what each person had contributed to the project. Even for single person projects it would have made it so much easier to detect cheaters. I also think it might light a fire u…

I think you overestimate the competence of the majority of professors. They can’t require version control if they don’t understand what it is or how to use it.

Back in the 90s I could kind of see this angle, but today it's so easy to set up a Gitlab there is no excuse.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#52

Post by danenania »

jvanderbot wrote: post #7

Any sufficiently good AI detector will soon become part of the training process.

That's true, but it's also straightforward to train detectors with massive quantities of human and AI-generated text. So AIs can be trained by the latest detectors, but detectors can also trained by the latest AIs. It will probably come down to which side has more resources to devote to training.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#53

Post by function_seven »

jandrese wrote: post #32
flatiron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works…ish. GPT4 is pretty good at detecting what it wrote but I was able to get a false positive with the United States constitution. Or maybe we can go deeper and say maybe it was AI generated?

So if you submitted the US Constitution word for word for your assignment you wouldn't expect the cheating detector to flag it? How isn't this flagrant plagiarism?

I would expect a plagiarism detector to flag it. I would not expect an "AI wrote this" to flag it, because it was not written by AI.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#54

Post by jacobsenscott »

okdood64 wrote: post #11

If a professor fails you because they thought your final essay was written by an AI and it wasn't, do you have legal grounds to start a lawsuit against the school?

Certainly anyone can start a lawsuit. Maybe there's eventually a chance for some kind of class action prevail, but I don't see how an individual student could make a dent against the resources of a university.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#55

Post by jacobsenscott »

minimaxir wrote: post #14
moffkalast wrote: post #9

Has anyone tried using an LLM as an LLM detector yet?

That is the implementation that many of these approaches are doing. It is a very, very hard problem.

It is an impossible problem. An llm can produce any combination of words. A human can produce any combination of words.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#56

Post by welshwelsh »

aripickar wrote: post #12

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 bar. For example, ask your art students to make complex compositions or animations that can't be handled by Midjourney without significant effort.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#57

Post by jfghi »

BashiBazouk wrote: post #38
aripickar wrote: post #12

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…

My wife started teaching a class at the local university. She had a bunch of positives on the anti-plagiarism software used by the university. She ran a bunch of papers by me and man, analyzing the results are an art within it's self. People will unconsciously remember and write down phrases and smaller sentences they have read all the time. A little highlight here and there just has to be accepted. Then there are th…

To me it seems like academic papers force people to back up every statement with a quote and agree with assigned readings. This style of writing leads to unoriginal results.

Re: It Wasn't AI

#58

Post by throwaway09223 »

function_seven wrote: post #50
throwaway09223 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but all of the above regarding making input look human is trivially easy -- because, again, AI.

More stringent hardware based input systems are likely non-starters due to ADA requirements. For example, disabled students have their own input systems and a college will have to allow them reasonable accommodations. Then there's the technical challenges. Some authoritarian minded schools might try this route, but I hope saner heads will prevail and they'll be able to re-evaluate why take-home work exists in the first place, and whether it's actually a problem for students to use AI to augment their education. Perhaps it isn't!

Re: It Wasn't AI

#59

Post by dv_dt »

aripickar wrote: post #12

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…

As a parent whose student has worked with multiple essay entry editors/forms, they're almost all terrible with most students having to revert to writing the essay outside the system or risk losing their work multiple times. And this was with a simple editor - not more complex connections to even more sophisticated systems.

The budget available for educational technology is not sufficient to maintain the operation of the software, let alone sufficient to pay technical staff adequate to assess and select reliable systems.

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