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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

> 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 reduced essay grading to an algorithm which values form over the content of the essay. The fact that AI can generate content with the required form should come as no surprise to anyone. Perhaps we should be teaching critical thinking and reading skills to evaluate the actual content of any essays.

tuesdayrain 7y ago
Then t
deleted 7y ago
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pmoriarty 7y ago
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.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  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.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    Exactly, it would be like colleges grading on the ability to add up long columns of numbers and complaining about spreadsheets. At one time, being able to add up long columns of number accurately using only a pencil and paper was a valuable business skill, now not so much.
  - riversflow 7y ago
    Doesn’t like /every/ good job require something along the lines of “Excellent Oral and Written communication”? Essays aren’t a proxy for anything, they are an end of itself. Just because this test essay can be written by an algorithm doesn’t mean that an algorithm can create actual original content you’d be expected to put out at a job.
  - benbreen 7y ago
    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 nonsensical, but the structure, grammar and language seem authentic at first glance. Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud. The issue isn't so much that AI has replaced essay writing. It's that it has the potential to create convincing (but fundamentally nonsensical/illogical) replicas of academic essays, which have the potential to make an already difficult job of assessment even harder (somewhat analogous to the problem of deepfakes). By the way, I'm currently thinking about writing something on this topic; if anyone has any thoughts please get in touch. Contact info in my profile.
    - analog31 7y ago
      >>> Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud. 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.
      - g82918 7y ago
        >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. When they pay so little why would a person spend hours reading and analyzing one essay. The bigger issue if the lack of resources devoted to grading and not that the people on the ground are cheating. edit: I think the commentator's emphasis should be on the lack of resources and not a supposed negligence on the grader's part.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Writing essays teaches people how to think and express ideas in a manner that allows the reader or listener to be engaged and also think and consider what’s being delivered. People who “wing it” are noticeable and don’t get the same engagement.
  - hnick 7y ago
    The essays can be a learning or training exercise for the student. Required, but not graded. We had plenty in high school like this. 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.
- woliveirajr 7y ago
  Stylometry is a hard task to be performed by humans and by computers... I've studied it for a while (master degree and PhD), and while we could have some success (>80% in verifying the authorship of a document against 100 authors), I think that it would be hard to make judgements solely based on a percentage below 99.9999%. OTOH, perhaps I should begin to study this matter again :-)
jancsika 7y ago
> 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  There is a difference between hobbies/sports and work. We still have horse riding, but FedEx doesn't evaluate horse riding ability before hiring delivery drivers.
- slphil 7y ago
  I'm not sure where you got that impression. The lowered attendance rate of in-person chess clubs is more than made up by the enormous amount of chess played online, high-level professional chess is doing better than ever, and it's seen by many parents as one of the most generalizable skills for a child to learn. (It's possible I just took a joke too seriously, but "chess is dead" is a common and incorrect take.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
landryraccoon 7y ago
We'll have to develop AIs that are trained to detect if the essay was written by a human or by an AI. 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..
- daniel-cussen 7y ago
  In a GANN, they are already trained together.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I had a teacher who did pass-fail essays. His rubric only had one box "Did I feel anything while reading this essay?" I think the technology still needs to develop much more before it can fool Mr. Thayer's grading system.
comicjk 7y ago
Computers have been able to do arithmetic faster, better, and cheaper than humans for decades. But we still teach children to do arithmetic, and grade them on how well they do it (almost never as well as a computer). Why? Because doing more useful and creative math is a lot easier if you can do a little arithmetic. The purpose of college essays has never been the quality of the product. The purpose is to have students practice so that, when they really do have to convey something in writing, they can convey it well. If an idea exists only in my head, it will take a very long time for an essay-writing bot to write it for me.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Speaking from experience, the person that writes best code (in terms of both raw quality and readability) also seem to write the best docs. Maybe teaching essays are sideways to efficient communication?
  - hirsin 7y ago
    Is it possible you have cause and effect reversed? I received this as "learning to code well can also teach good communication skills"
  - miemo 7y ago
    I think you're right - an essay should communicate a key thought, broken down in logical steps, coherently tied together. This is important for a whole host of skills.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    Although we have machines that now cut and bind books, the best book binding (and most aesthetic) are done by hand by enthusiasts on, e.g., Reddit. Moreover, such book binders don't feel threatened by machines, I would think, like how people who do DIY do it because they like it, rather than because they have to do it. Even if an AI can write an essay, that would not stop me from writing. Essays have another important dimension, which is that of creativity and the message. I think the only real relevance is in the context of school work, outside of that I don't think the AI's ability is that important. People are intelligent already, and competition between writers or the general tendency to influence each other sometimes is even a good thing.

tuesdayrain 7y ago

Then t

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pmoriarty 7y ago

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.

notduncansmith 7y ago
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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  Exactly, it would be like colleges grading on the ability to add up long columns of numbers and complaining about spreadsheets. At one time, being able to add up long columns of number accurately using only a pencil and paper was a valuable business skill, now not so much.
- riversflow 7y ago
  Doesn’t like /every/ good job require something along the lines of “Excellent Oral and Written communication”? Essays aren’t a proxy for anything, they are an end of itself. Just because this test essay can be written by an algorithm doesn’t mean that an algorithm can create actual original content you’d be expected to put out at a job.
- benbreen 7y ago
  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 nonsensical, but the structure, grammar and language seem authentic at first glance. Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud. The issue isn't so much that AI has replaced essay writing. It's that it has the potential to create convincing (but fundamentally nonsensical/illogical) replicas of academic essays, which have the potential to make an already difficult job of assessment even harder (somewhat analogous to the problem of deepfakes). By the way, I'm currently thinking about writing something on this topic; if anyone has any thoughts please get in touch. Contact info in my profile.
  - analog31 7y ago
    >>> Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud. 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.
    - g82918 7y ago
      >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. When they pay so little why would a person spend hours reading and analyzing one essay. The bigger issue if the lack of resources devoted to grading and not that the people on the ground are cheating. edit: I think the commentator's emphasis should be on the lack of resources and not a supposed negligence on the grader's part.
- mc32 7y ago
  Writing essays teaches people how to think and express ideas in a manner that allows the reader or listener to be engaged and also think and consider what’s being delivered. People who “wing it” are noticeable and don’t get the same engagement.
- hnick 7y ago
  The essays can be a learning or training exercise for the student. Required, but not graded. We had plenty in high school like this. 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.
woliveirajr 7y ago
Stylometry is a hard task to be performed by humans and by computers... I've studied it for a while (master degree and PhD), and while we could have some success (>80% in verifying the authorship of a document against 100 authors), I think that it would be hard to make judgements solely based on a percentage below 99.9999%. OTOH, perhaps I should begin to study this matter again :-)

jancsika 7y ago

> 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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
There is a difference between hobbies/sports and work. We still have horse riding, but FedEx doesn't evaluate horse riding ability before hiring delivery drivers.
slphil 7y ago
I'm not sure where you got that impression. The lowered attendance rate of in-person chess clubs is more than made up by the enormous amount of chess played online, high-level professional chess is doing better than ever, and it's seen by many parents as one of the most generalizable skills for a child to learn. (It's possible I just took a joke too seriously, but "chess is dead" is a common and incorrect take.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

landryraccoon 7y ago

We'll have to develop AIs that are trained to detect if the essay was written by a human or by an AI. 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..

daniel-cussen 7y ago
In a GANN, they are already trained together.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

I had a teacher who did pass-fail essays. His rubric only had one box "Did I feel anything while reading this essay?" I think the technology still needs to develop much more before it can fool Mr. Thayer's grading system.

comicjk 7y ago

Computers have been able to do arithmetic faster, better, and cheaper than humans for decades. But we still teach children to do arithmetic, and grade them on how well they do it (almost never as well as a computer). Why? Because doing more useful and creative math is a lot easier if you can do a little arithmetic. The purpose of college essays has never been the quality of the product. The purpose is to have students practice so that, when they really do have to convey something in writing, they can convey it well. If an idea exists only in my head, it will take a very long time for an essay-writing bot to write it for me.

Aperocky 7y ago
Speaking from experience, the person that writes best code (in terms of both raw quality and readability) also seem to write the best docs. Maybe teaching essays are sideways to efficient communication?
- hirsin 7y ago
  Is it possible you have cause and effect reversed? I received this as "learning to code well can also teach good communication skills"
- miemo 7y ago
  I think you're right - an essay should communicate a key thought, broken down in logical steps, coherently tied together. This is important for a whole host of skills.
- mikorym 7y ago
  Although we have machines that now cut and bind books, the best book binding (and most aesthetic) are done by hand by enthusiasts on, e.g., Reddit. Moreover, such book binders don't feel threatened by machines, I would think, like how people who do DIY do it because they like it, rather than because they have to do it. Even if an AI can write an essay, that would not stop me from writing. Essays have another important dimension, which is that of creativity and the message. I think the only real relevance is in the context of school work, outside of that I don't think the AI's ability is that important. People are intelligent already, and competition between writers or the general tendency to influence each other sometimes is even a good thing.