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Right, totally forgot essay mills were a thing. Originally, outside of plagiarism, I couldn't think of any ways to cheat on an essay. Part of writing an essay,

by thdc 4y ago

Right, totally forgot essay mills were a thing. Originally, outside of plagiarism, I couldn't think of any ways to cheat on an essay. Part of writing an essay, or at least the type of essay I'm thinking of, is researching and criticizing other views on the subject, so if you find some material to draw from you might a well incorporate it properly. The other part is presenting your own thoughts - which I assume is where ChatGPT came into play. I'm not aware of anything that could handle this part before ChatGPT (or other LLMs) existed short of presenting other people's thoughts as your own (also plagiarism).

g_p 4y ago
Part of the challenge around essays is likely also what type of essay is sought, and the content required. Some educators are lazy, and just want something submitted with credible sounding words, parroting something suitably deferential to the accepted norms of the field. Those kinds of essays are the ones most likely to find themselves the subjects of tech or non tech enabled cheating. They're also effectively low signal to noise ratio measures, and I'd discourage them. When someone is presenting their own views, they can still steal someone else's... But there's going to be more breadth in these, and (hopefully) more substance in the essays. I personally don't consider essays to be useful at all - maybe they're appropriate in certain disciplines, but I'd argue the more concerned a professor or department is about language models, the less intellectual merit there is in the subject, or at least the work being used to assess understanding of the subject. Unfortunately, few educators focus on really trying to assess understanding and ability to apply understanding to new situations, but that's the kind of reasoning that generative models will struggle with. A very quick way to catch language model users out might be to ask them a bit about the same topic, then in a second paper give them their own initial assignment back and ask them to critically evaluate it now. Good luck critically evaluating hollow, vapid GPT waffle in timed exam conditions!
- zekrioca 4y ago
  It’s astonishing that the word “generative” gets applied to technologies that are designed to duplicate, adapt, interpolate, or outright plagiarize without attribution in most cases. The skills trained into these codes do a lot of things and can produce impressive results, but when these results are traced to their sources, “generation” is at best a last-place description of what they do, and may be entirely absent.

by thdc 4y ago

g_p 4y ago

Part of the challenge around essays is likely also what type of essay is sought, and the content required. Some educators are lazy, and just want something submitted with credible sounding words, parroting something suitably deferential to the accepted norms of the field. Those kinds of essays are the ones most likely to find themselves the subjects of tech or non tech enabled cheating. They're also effectively low signal to noise ratio measures, and I'd discourage them. When someone is presenting their own views, they can still steal someone else's... But there's going to be more breadth in these, and (hopefully) more substance in the essays. I personally don't consider essays to be useful at all - maybe they're appropriate in certain disciplines, but I'd argue the more concerned a professor or department is about language models, the less intellectual merit there is in the subject, or at least the work being used to assess understanding of the subject. Unfortunately, few educators focus on really trying to assess understanding and ability to apply understanding to new situations, but that's the kind of reasoning that generative models will struggle with. A very quick way to catch language model users out might be to ask them a bit about the same topic, then in a second paper give them their own initial assignment back and ask them to critically evaluate it now. Good luck critically evaluating hollow, vapid GPT waffle in timed exam conditions!

zekrioca 4y ago
It’s astonishing that the word “generative” gets applied to technologies that are designed to duplicate, adapt, interpolate, or outright plagiarize without attribution in most cases. The skills trained into these codes do a lot of things and can produce impressive results, but when these results are traced to their sources, “generation” is at best a last-place description of what they do, and may be entirely absent.