17 ms·

"You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

• Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
• gustavus 3y ago
  AI Detection services are the oiliest of snake oils. Seems like education is going to need to change drastically in the next few years. Maybe we'll go all the way back to oral examinations again.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I doubt oral examinations come back in general. The undergrad model relys on massive classes, I don’t see how you can do oral exams in those 300 person classes without massive cheating as the first students tell everyone else what to expect.
    • nsxwolf 3y ago
      Use ChatGPT to write and administer 300 personalized oral exams.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        The issue with different exams for each students is that it’s next to impossible to make them equally difficult which ruins the curve.
        • btilly 3y ago
          The suggestion was personalized, not different. ChatGPT could have the exact same set of questions to ask. All students are independently taking the same exam at the same time, responding conversationally. ChatGPT asks all of them the same question, and then probes based on weaknesses in the responses. Grades the answer to that question, then moves on to the next. Everyone got equal questions. Is there going to be inconsistency in how minor wording trips different followups? Sure. But it isn't clear that this randomness is worse than the subjective differences in how humans grade an essay response to a question.
          • HDThoreaun 3y ago
            Ah yea I could see something like that propping up
        • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
          You've missed the point of curves. Curves exist as a different solution to the problem of "we don't know whether everybody understands the material or not, and we don't know how to evaluate whether they do". It's like saying "The problem with electric cars is that they don't fit the equipment for our emissions test" If you give a pre-written test, you basically need to curve it because you don't really know how well the test aligns with your expectations of the class's understanding of the material. So you say "typically, about 20% of the class doesn't understand the course at all, 20% have a very good grasp..." etc, and then fit the written test results to the expected curve. A one-on-one communication with a student allows you to directly gauge their understanding, allowing you to assign a grade. It doesn't matter how well or poorly the rest of the class understands the material, this student, sitting in front of me, has a "B" level understanding.
          • HDThoreaun 3y ago
            I disagree. The point of curves is to differentiate the students. Students who don’t understand do and the material should be failed, it that doesn’t tell us who should get A vs B vs C
            • pierat 3y ago
              "Do they proficiently understand the topic?" Should be met with a trinary answer: YES, NO, WITHDRAW. We should not encourage stack ranking (or a curve) as a way to stratify students because they joined the class with too many smarter people. Go read up about stack ranking, and why it's a horrific practice. In a "grade on a curve" situation, it benefits you to drop the class if there's too many people you think smarter or more experienced than you. And it benefits you if you're smarter than them. And, thats a REALLY UGLY way to approach education.
              • HDThoreaun 3y ago
                In the end I guess it comes down to what the point of undergrad is. Imo we have completely left the "learn stuff" era and are in the "differentiate yourself to employers" era. That means that stack ranking is largely the point, even if it has many downsides.
    • arcticfox 3y ago
      I feel like a 5-minute conversation, not a pre-determined list of oral questions, on most non-hard science topics would be enough to evaluate a student. You could even have an LLM grade it as a second opinion.
      • mrweasel 3y ago
        We had an exam that was either pass or fail, no grades. The professor and censor would kick you out with a "PASS" in five minutes if they felt that you had sufficient grasp of the topic. Some found it a bit offensive, I just loved how efficient it was. I happened to hang around on the first day of their planned three days examination and the professor just popped his head out the door and asked if I was ready now (a day and a half early), sure... I guess. Five minutes later "PASS. NEXT!"
      • Negitivefrags 3y ago
        I am starting a private high school and this is exactly how we plan to assess students. Not the LLM part though. Not only do you get a good sense of what they know, but you get a chance to give real individual feedback about what they need to focus on next. Of course towards the end in order to get a qualification that a university will accept as entrance we will need to teach the kids to pass the standardised tests too.
    • petemir 3y ago
      Furthermore oral examinations do not scale. We had to do them during covid times and it was gruesome, spending full days in meetings and losing a full week with only 70-80 students.
      • brucethemoose2 3y ago
        What about a voiced AI chatbot to handle the simpler questions? Fight fire with fire.
        • wfvr 3y ago
          An AI could generate relevant questions, follow-up questions during the oral, and evaluate the student at the end. The teacher could then review the whole conversarion at a glance and check/adjust the AI evaluation, which shouldn't take more time than grading an exam and be equally scalable. I've actually tested this with a VR app (with support for mobile also), and it actually works quite well.
          • brucethemoose2 3y ago
            > An AI could generate relevant questions, follow-up questions during the oral, and evaluate the student at the end. I dunno about that level of automation. Maybe the proctors can use it to generate a big bag of questions beforehand, that they manually review, but generating them on the fly is just asking for trouble. Administering the preset questions and responding to the student is a much better fit.
          • Brian_K_White 3y ago
            So as a student, I'm forced to converse with an ai and take it seriously, when in reality I reject them all? The whole original post is an example of this being terrible and not a solution for anything. It's bad enough that these things don't do a good job, don't basically function for the task, but what's as bad or worse is being forced to pretend you buy into it all like having to pretend to believe in some religion just to not get killed by everyone else. I'm not a student and so far I have been free to judge all these ais as bad on a variety of fronts, and not use them (directly anyway, of course they are used behind the scenes in ways that affect me which I can't control). This would be hell.
    • ineptech 3y ago
      Is there any value to those lectures, nowadays? I can see a PhD lecture on the fundamentals of virtually any academic topic, for free and at my leisure, on youtube and similar sites. Waking up at 8am to attend an in-person Geology 117 lecture with 300 other freshmen is probably as outdated as a fax machine. Perhaps the next step is, education that isn't based on personal instruction isn't rare enough to be worth paying for.
      • mdorazio 3y ago
        The value is the degree you get at the end of your coursework.
        • cooper_ganglia 3y ago
          Ah, I see, so no value then.
          • goatlover 3y ago
            Very much depends on the field you're in. It's a requirement for some careers.
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        The value of lecture is to see what you are expected to know for the exam. Khan academy isn’t necessarily covering the same things in the same order or level of detail as your professor.
      • godelski 3y ago
        As a PhD candidate (post classes) I honestly use those lectures a lot. No, I do not find a massive classroom better than an online lecture. Actually worse. The advantage of a classroom over a video lecture is the ability to interrupt and ask questions. To have the expert in front of you. In this day and age, sitting in a classroom and not participating is an entire waste of money and you're doing yourself a disservice by not participating. I actively remind my students this when I teach, who honestly are less active post pandemic. It is something I worry about. And though my account is "anonymous", if you ever show up to my lectures, not as a student but just sitting in (I don't take attendance, idk if you walk off the street and want to sit in), you too are welcome to participate. (Fwiw, there aren't really "PhD level lectures" so much as graduate lectures. Generally you stop taking classes at the end of year 2 in your PhD, which is equivalent to a masters. The distinction of the PhD is that you are learning to learn on your own. This does add extra context to why grad students ask for higher pay, especially at the non-conditional and candidate levels, as they're actually taking less resources from the school. E.g. I pay the school $10k/term (big round) for research credits, which requires no involvement from anyone. There no longer is the "student" part to my "51% student, 49% employee" split)
    • specproc 3y ago
      I'm assuming this is America? 300 person classes is insane, particular how much debt's involved. I've studied in the UK and EU, and I don't think I've ever been in a class larger than 40.
      • amalcon 3y ago
        The bigger schools like Harvard often have that for the first year classes, especially classes that are required for all or many majors. The class itself, and the lectures, will have many students -- but there's usually ample availability of grad student TAs for more individualized interaction. A grad student is usually perfectly capable of teaching a freshman class. Smaller schools and upper level classes generally just have fewer people. Edit: Keep in mind that teaching is something the professor usually just puts up with, to get the resources and credibility to do the thing they are really passionate about (research or writing).
      • bluGill 3y ago
        One someone is standing in front of the room talking it doesn't really matter if there is one person in the room or 1 billion. sure you need a PA system and other technology to support a large crowd, but otherwise it doesn't matter. Most students would prefer to be in a large room with someone who is a great speaker vs a small room with less. If you do have questions - that is what the TA is for and you get to see the TA at least weekly. Note that the above only applies if the class is supposed to be a lecture. If it is supposed to be interactive then small classes are better. However many of the basic undergrad 1st year courses have been done so often the professor should already answer all possible questions if you keep listening. As you advance that becomes less and less true of course.
        • sumtechguy 3y ago
          Also they are the 'weeder' classes as the staff put it to me. Basically everyone wants to go to college. Many can get in. But not everyone is cut out for it. Those classes are usually decently challenging but mostly lectures. They cut out the people who should not be there or are not ready for it. They are also decently big because almost all of the curriculum paths require these core classes. Your second year will be 20-30 people. By the time you are in your 4th year most classes are 10-15 people usually mixed graduate/undergraduate people.
    • pmarreck 3y ago
      > I don’t see how you can do oral exams in those 300 person classes Well that's easy: An AI will administer the oral exam and transcribe the oral answers from each person simultaneously, and possibly even grade it!
    • nicbou 3y ago
      One thing I don't understand is that despite automating more and more of the work away, we seem to have fewer and fewer humans available for anything that's left. I have to scan my own groceries, I can't ever talk to an actual human at any business, I order my food from a machine. Where is everyone?
      • mistercheph 3y ago
        Didn't you know? Everyone is engaged. What did you think the point of all those engagement metrics were? To get everybody engaged. I like it better like this, before, almost no one was engaged.
      • b112 3y ago
        The boomers are retiring. Yes, really, that's what's happening. And it is going to get far, far worse.
        • letrowekwel 3y ago
          The boomers are retiring, and the US economy is strong. Here in EU boomers are also retiring, but many countries still have high youth unemployment, and there is no real worker shortage even if businesses like to complain about one.
      • _jal 3y ago
        > Where is everyone? Get used to it. The emerging model is a virtual vending machine - if what you want isn't there, tough. If the machine breaks, well, sorry about your dollar, maybe it'll work next week. If you want to talk to a human, start by getting rich. That costs extra.
      • Meekro 3y ago
        I've wondered about this myself. It's not just grocery scanning-- my parents used to get a bunch of bills in the mail every month, and send out a bunch of checks to pay them. It's stunning to think about how many people were needed at every step of that pipeline to make the whole thing work. All of that's automated now, and you can find similar things in many industries. That should have freed up lots of people to handle the special cases that fall through the cracks of the automation, but they're nowhere to be found.
    • beej71 3y ago
      Scaling is an issue for sure--just having the time in the week is impossible without distributing the work to TAs, and administering oral exams is tough for TAs. But you can do an oral exam along the lines of "explain to me how your project works" and that'll catch people who don't understand it regardless of whether or not they know the question in advance.
    • slaymaker1907 3y ago
      You're right about oral examinations, but written _proctored_ exams would also solve a lot of these problems, particularly if you require it to be handwritten. Having take home essays be handwritten would also help deter using AI by making it much more inconvenient to use compared to just doing the assignment in the first place.
      • sho_hn 3y ago
        And these days, we can even rely on AI to parse the illegible handwriting!
      • amalcon 3y ago
        I went to high school (secondary school) back when it was pretty normal to forbid students from typing assignments because "not everyone has a computer". I happen to be personally responsible, via my terrible handwriting, for at least two teachers dropping that policy. At least one other just gave me a specific exception in the name of "accessibility".
        • devilbunny 3y ago
          A student a year ahead of me had atrocious handwriting. They allowed him to type up his AP tests after the answer period and included the typewritten sheets along with his handwritten booklet (so the graders could confirm he hadn’t altered his answers).
        • faeriechangling 3y ago
          They did for me as well (dysgraphia is the technical word). They made me practice handwriting after class and I think all the times I resultingly burst into tears because my wrist hurt made them take pity on me. For how much schools talk about how useful handwriting is at memorisation and such - I seldom see anybody in the working world pulling out some paper and handwriting notes. Schools seem to care more about teaching you to pass closed-book tests than they do about teaching you useful skills like how to create high quality, organised, and searchable notes.
      • xena 3y ago
    • fiftyfifty 3y ago
      Unfortunately the tried-and-true multiple choice exam complete with Scantron answer sheets remains fairly resistant to cheating with AI and is fully scalable to classes of any size. The only hope for these poor students is that AI can help their professors write better test questions.
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    • madmax96 3y ago
      It doesn’t matter if students know what to expect. An oral exam isn’t the same as reading a written exam out loud. There are a set of learning outcomes defined in the syllabus. The examiner uses the learning outcomes to ask probing questions that start a conversation - emphasis on conversation. A conversation can’t be faked. A simple follow up question can reveal a student only has a shallow understanding of material. Or, the student could remember everything they’ve been told, but fail to make connections between learning outcomes. You can’t cram for an oral exam. You have to digest the course material and think about what things mean in context. After all, students know what to expect on standardized tests. Some still do better than others :-).
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      • entropinflictor 3y ago
        >"a conversation can't be faked" It can. An examiner questions are gonna be parsed via covert Voice recognition,processed by ai and replies played back via a e. g. small headset(a magnet inside an ear cavity, accompanied by an induction loop wire around the neck(works fine,google "микронаушник магнит" in russian, it's popular here) , and it's not as hard as you may think.
    • wodenokoto 3y ago
      Most oral exams I've been to have been either a) talk about a report you've written, or b) draw 1 of x (say 8) subjects that have been covered throughout the year, and do a presentation on it, usually with 20-30 minutes preparation. All subjects have of course been published at least 2 weeks prior to the exam. So I don't see a problem with telling "what to expect", but I do see a problem with 1 professor and one censor examining 300 students for for 30 minutes each.
  • mrweasel 3y ago
    Students should have the right to be shown exactly where and why texts are flagged. Much of the snake oil will disappear pretty quickly if the solutions are required to provide any form of proof. It's would be funny, if it also wasn't so sad, that the point is that the students need to prove that they did the work, while shitty software can flag their work as being plagiarism or AI generated while providing no proof.
    • onemoresoop 3y ago
      Sounds like a nightmare is about to start for kids, parents, schools, teachers and so on. Would be easily solved by going back to oral examinations, paper and pen in class essays...
      • pierat 3y ago
        Or better yet, get rid of all HOME-work. Do it all inclass. We train children and up to adulthood that encroaching on time for self is acceptable, and its absolutely not. I remember asshole teachers giving out essay homeworks during christmas breaks and similar, because "we needed to be busy". No wonder why wage theft is the biggest retail theft we have - those utter lack of boundaries are eroded the moment we set foot in schools. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/owed-employers-face-little-accountability-for-wage-theft/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/owed-employers-face-little-acco...
        • em-bee 3y ago
          at university level that's not really going to work. you have lectures and assignments and maybe meetings to discuss assignments or present work. there are no more classes like in school. at least there weren't in my university. you are also missing one important aspect: work is usually 40 hours a week. full time study should be 40 hours too. but at least where i come from, you generally have less than 20 hours of lectures and TA meetings, etc. so you are absolutely expected to spend the other 20 hours in your room or in the library working on assignments. that is not encroaching on your time. there is only a problem if you spend more time on assignments causing you to work/study more than 40 hours in a week
  • RandomLensman 3y ago
    Wouldn't just things were people sit in a room without or limited tools to write the exam work, too?
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yep the old "blue book" exams I had to sit. You get the exam questions on a piece of paoer, and a small booklet of blank paper in which to write your answers. Called a "blue book" because the cover sheet on the booklet was a sky blue color.
      • spondylosaurus 3y ago
        Blue book exams were super common when I graduated undergrad less than a decade ago—they may be old, but they're enduring :)
    • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      Or you can just trust your students. Most upper-division courses I took at university gave take-home exams. "Here's the test, come back with it in a couple days, don't talk about your answers with other students".
      • Gigachad 3y ago
        lmao, and then find that the whole class has a discord group for exchanging answers.
        • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
          Being kicked out of the science school and into the business school is a pretty huge punishment that late in the game, for negligible reward: "Oooh, I aced my Particle Physics final". It was just easier to do the test honestly, and lick your wounds later.
          • Ekaros 3y ago
  • dheera 3y ago
    The entire idea of "spit out knowledge in 1 hour without references" is such a terrible test of one's capability in the real world that it should not be done at all.
  • GloriousKoji 3y ago
    "The more things change, the more they stay the same." When I was a student decades ago it was when they first introduced anti-plagiarism software. We all had to submit a printed out copy of our book reports along with a floppy disk or cd-rom of our report in the latest Microsoft Word format. Almost the whole class was flagged for plagiarism. Of course the school takes plagiarism very seriously so we all had to have a one-on-one with the principal. The real truth is no one copied each others work and it was the anti-plagiarism software flagging essays because students quoted parts of the book and expanded on that. In hindsight as an adult I think the excessive principal one-on-ones was the teachers way of shoving it to him and his new software.
    • natpalmer1776 3y ago
      The best form of protest is often (malicious) compliance.
    • fennecfoxy 3y ago
      Yeah I remember TurnItIn. It sucked hard. And of course all Uni staff put 100% trust in it to be completely infallible and not be a piece of crap bit of software.
  • koito17 3y ago
    Mathematics programs in Europe still use oral examinations, though they are increasingly rare in the United States. I'm not European, but I have always preferred oral examinations over written examinations because I can actually communicate my understanding of the problem to the professor and outline my thought process towards a solution, something that is much harder to do in writing, especially since you cannot get any hints or feedback on your attempts during a written examination -- you're on your own.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • beached_whale 3y ago
    They need to be sued into pain. They are part of the problem and are hurting people. People are going to cheat, we know this, it is an incentive problem. But there is no excuse for false positives
  • fennecfoxy 3y ago
    As per usual the problem isn't the technology or the tools, it's the dumb meatbag using them. This teacher should have thought "hmm, well if I'm going to pull up students on this then it's probably important I do my own research to make sure that I know that the score means and how reliable it is" but nope. "LLMs are bad cause people will use them to generate spam and fake news!" LLMs aren't the bad actor there...it's the human doing the spamming. There is a fine line, though. For example the "guns don't kill people argument" is pretty moot, gun control saves lives. If someone grabs an LLM, tells it to "generate text telling young impressionable teens to kill themselves" and spam it on Twitter...well the human is doing bad stuff but they're still enabled by the LLM. However it's easy to enact something like gun control on a physical object. Software? Well, damn that's gonna a problem - especially when the metric by which these LLMs "do better" is how closely the text resembles a hooman.
• linusha 3y ago
  Has anyone field-tested strategies to fighting allegations like this and would like to share them? Something I remember from a previous discussion around this topic was writing everything in e.g., Google Docs, where there are captured versions every few seconds. The idea being that the version log shows that one did not copy-and-paste larger chunks of the text.
  • brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Or even just set up a "computer cam" that films yourself working. Most laptops can handle this pretty effortlessly with their encode blocks.
    • morkalork 3y ago
      This is what it's come to with digital art hasn't it? Artists recording their screens.
      • kevingadd 3y ago
        Due to the nature of the art process it's not uncommon for artists to stream live on youtube/twitch with some music and get a decent number of viewers. Sadly the same wouldn't apply for writing I think.
    • TheGlav 3y ago
      Yeah, but what if they have a bag of chips, and inside that bag of chips, is a small tablet or phone, in which they ask chat gpt to give them the essay, and then they transcribe it? They might even eat some of those chips to obfuscate that they're getting the information from the bag. At some level, there has to be some trust, or a system (e.g., in person proctored exams) would have to be used instead.
  • jetrink 3y ago
    I bet students would start to print out the plagiarized essays and retype them. If the plagiarists made an effort to make minor changes and rearrange things as they went, no screen recorder or edit history could distinguish it from normal essay writing.
• sdfghswe 3y ago
  Paradigm changes have been happening since there's been humans around. Some people adapt, others don't.
  • yazzku 3y ago
    Condescending (and useless) comment of the day.
    • sdfghswe 3y ago
      It's not useless. Hopefully it will remind people (those with an attitude better than yours) that it's all within you to create the change you want.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        > it's all within you to create the change you want. No it most certainly is not.
        • sdfghswe 3y ago
          Of course it is. For example, you can make it a game: how can you write in a way that could never be confused with AI? As a bonus, this is almost guaranteed to mean that you'll have a unique style. Writers have been putting challenges to themselves since writing has existed. Minimize number of words, write without using certain letters, etc. It's fun. This person (furry?) just chooses to give up at the slightest obstacle.
          • larvaetron 3y ago
            > bro what's the big deal bro just write the paper exactly the way we want you to bro
            • sdfghswe 3y ago
              > bro what's the big deal bro just write the paper exactly the way we want you to bro Why are talking like that to me? Are you responding to someone else? I literally cannot comprehend how my suggestion that playing with words might be fun could be interpreted as bro-y. EDIT: Lol I just skimmed your comment history and it's just garbage like this.
• _yb2s 3y ago
  I would sue the teacher and school if this happened to me… total BS. Also plagarism and having other people do your work, or even take exams for you is as old as time. How is AI any different? Some trust is in order here. The students are the ones paying to be educated, if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.
  • Miraste 3y ago
    >if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways. I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.
    • fzzzy 3y ago
      So then who cares if they got an education? If they want to pay for 1 and 2 but didn't get an education, why does it matter.
      • itishappy 3y ago
        Universities care. They can't charge as much for just 1 & 2. The rest of us might too, if we expect "I have a degree in X from Y university" to imply some level of competence.
      • btilly 3y ago
        People who see education as a valuable credential care. And yes, there are a lot of people who would like to outsource questions of competence to, "Do you have the credentials that I am looking for?" Any cynicism about the competence of people who do this is fully justified. But conversely, it isn't the worst approach to take to evaluating people when you personally lack competence. As an example, I would never hire a programmer based on credentials. But it is often the first and only thing that I look for in a random doctor visit.
      • ziddoap 3y ago
        If I go to my doctor, or counsellor, or engineer, or mechanic, or... the list goes on... I care that they actually got an education rather than cheated their way through it. These are all things I can't personally judge competence in, because I'm not competent in medicine, psychology, engineering, etc. The most reasonable way for me to judge competence is whether an accredited school vouches for them via a degree.
• garciasn 3y ago
  I am an Eagle Scout and was awarded it in 1995. As part of that process, I had to write up a detailed document outlining my project including how it was conceived, the work, and the outcome. It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS. My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lost on me to this day. This is nothing new; it’s been happening forever and will continue to happen, we just have a new reason to drive a race to the bottom. I hate the world we live in.
  • tegmark 3y ago
    wow, computers writing essays that cannot be distinguished from human written essays and the ramifications of this have been going on for… ever. i dont know how to say it nicely… youre just blatantly wrong.
    • sneed_chucker 3y ago
      Right. I don't know what to call it, but I'm annoyed by the near pathological need for some people to respond to every piece of news with "same as it ever was".
      • RichardCA 3y ago
        It's called "a posture of shallow cynicism" that adds nothing to the discussion.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Sounds like that troop had bigger issues. If they don't trust an Eagle candidate's attestation of authorship, they probably shouldn't have let (or been the ones to let) the candidate progress that far.
    • taylodl 3y ago
      It's not handled at the troop level. The Eagle review is at district and council level. It's common for candidates to receive "assistance" to help along the process and the review boards are on the lookout for that.
• belkinpower 3y ago
  Nitter link, in case anyone else is hitting a login barrier: https://nitter.net/rustykitty_/status/1709316764868153537 https://nitter.net/rustykitty_/status/1709316764868153537
• wccrawford 3y ago
  When I was in college, they were going to put carpet in the science labs, and a few of us thought it was a really stupid, dangerous idea. We started a petition and asked for signatures at the on-campus cafe. After a few days, the administrators asked us into their office for a chat. They asked us stupid questions and tried to talk us out of our petition. When it didn't work, they eventually caved and didn't do the carpet that year. They waited for the next year. Then a couple years later, they put back the tile. I don't know why they were so scared of our petition, but I'm sure this is another situation that could benefit from one. It sends a very clear message about the situation to people very high up in the food chain. And I'm sure it could get a ton of signatures.
  • unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Why were they so intent on carpet for the science labs? I mean, why change the flooring type at all?
    • davidkuennen 3y ago
      I really want to know as well. Why was the carpet so important to them?
      • mistercheph 3y ago
        Have you ever interacted with a bureaucracy? They are an LLM assembled from human flesh: Random behavior, incomprehensible rationales, and an unstoppable and undirectable force of iron will.
    • kirykl 3y ago
      Budget not spent is budget lost
    • a_shovel 3y ago
      It's a power thing. Authorities make arbitrary changes just because they can, and exercising their power feels good. They ignore the reason people object to those changes and interpret the objections as challenges to their power and direct personal insults. Basicly, "I'm in charge" outweighs "this is dangerous".
• giarc 3y ago
  If you submit a word document, is there some way to detect if the words were typed out, how long the document was open etc? Basically trying to detect if the student pasted the text? Obviously students would get around this simply by typing it out word for word, but could work here.
  • alwayslikethis 3y ago
    I'm against using surveillance as a means to combat AI. It can just as easily be fabricated.
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    No, there's no mechanism in the Word file format itself to store this information. There's the file system metadata (Created/Accessed/Modified time) which tells you for how long the file was open before being saved. However, file system metadata is likely to be lost when you submit the document. Ultimately, you could not prevent this timer from being spoofed unless you installed rootkits on the students' computers, and unfortunately (for the security and privacy of students) rootkits are what is often used.
  • lozenge 3y ago
    If you use Google Docs, the edit history would pretty clearly the progress and different drafts. I guess eventually somebody will prompt ChatGPT in the right way to create realistic drafts and edits as well.
    • 9dev 3y ago
      Watch me Place my tablet with ChatGPT next to my laptop and type the essay off of that into Google Docs on the laptop. Whatever contrived solution you come up with, students will find ingenious solutions around them.
      • UncleMeat 3y ago
        Of course. But you also catch some of the fools.
• dsalzman 3y ago
  Should bring back in class writing essay tests on paper. One page long. Incentive critical thinking not page length.
  • htag 3y ago
    That's a valid way of testing a student's knowledge. I do think that tests somewhat different skills and knowledge than the 20+ hours I would spend on large undergraduate essays. Most critically, the longer format probably is better at training students to get published in academic journals.
• jccalhoun 3y ago
  As a professor at a community college, I am very hesitant to just declare something is AI generated unless is it very clear. If I suspect something is AI generated I run it through 3 different checkers that I found online and if they don't all agree then I don't call it plagiarism. Normally the writing is so vague that it isn't more than a C anyway.
  • natdempk 3y ago
    You shouldn’t be using AI detectors. They aren’t accurate and other approaches to teaching need to be used instead of leaning on old methods: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educator...
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      What are those "other approaches". Just in-person exams, right?
      • danShumway 3y ago
        It's frustrating that I can't know for certain who's going to win the 2024 election, but that doesn't mean I'd be justified in making a prediction based on a magic 8 ball. AI detectors don't work. If there aren't any other tools and methods that do detect AI, that genuinely stinks, it's a difficult problem. I definitely sympathize. But all the sympathizing in the world won't change the fact that AI detectors don't work. There are lots of unsolved problems in the world, and they don't justify putting weight behind non-solutions. I don't know how to cure Alzheimer's disease, but I know that a TV healer can't cure it, and if doctors started prescribing TV healers it would be medical malpractice. Similarly, I don't know how to tell if an essay was AI written... but neither do the AI detectors, and it is unethical for professors to rely on them to make decisions about plagiarism. When you have an unsolved problem and someone proposes a bad solution with bad consequences, what you end up with is the same unsolved problem, still unsolved, plus a newly created additional problem on top of it from your bad solution. You started with the problem of rampant plagiarism and cheating, now you have both a problem with rampant plagiarism and cheating, and a new problem with making baseless accusations of cheating against potentially honest students with no real evidence.
• jonathanstrange 3y ago
  This is apparently unpopular but my take on this is that if teachers want students to write something on which AI can get high scores, then whatever they're teaching is obsolete and will be replaced by AIs anyway. Of course, not mentioning AI as co-author remains cheating. But I think the best course of action is to simply allow students to use AI while mentioning it (and the prompts they've used). I'm in philosophy and so far no AI has produced a text of interest to me. If it did, then I'd deal with it like with any arguments by colleagues.
  • seanoliver 3y ago
    Not unpopular at all IMO. AI should be (and is) raising the bar all around, both for students and for teachers. This teacher is failing the test.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      My boss told me AI isn't quite ready for production yet, but I should expect in just a few years that I'm expected to use an AI for most of my coding tasks. AI can write some very good code, but sometimes it does some "why did you do it that way" things which might or might not be a valid shortcut. Time will tell.
  • dmm 3y ago
    > if teachers want students to write something on which AI can get high scores, then whatever they're teaching is obsolete Doing trivial things is often the first step in learning how to do non-trivial things. No one has ever needed a five paragraph essay. It's a completely artificial construct that, hopefully, teaches people to structure an essay. Electronic calculators have existed for decades but we're still teaching kids arithmetic.
    • fluoridation 3y ago
      >we're still teaching kids arithmetic. I remain unconvinced that it's a worthwhile use of time.
• seanoliver 3y ago
  What is the actual problem with AI generated text in and of itself? If it was completely AI generated without any human intervention, it likely would have been fairly generic / poor writing anyway. At least for the time being, AI is a new tool at our disposal but it's still just a tool, like a calculator or a hammer. Students should be judged on the merit of the work even if some of the work is AI generated.
  • htag 3y ago
    The biggest problem I see is that learning usually requires effort/work and AI requires students to do less effort/work to achieve the same output. So the worry is that the quality of education received will decrease. Example: no one cares that you wrote 5 pages on To Kill a Mocking Bird. They care that you read the book and thought critically about it. AI allows students to skip the reading and critical thinking portion, which is the most important part.
• Animats 3y ago
  The message from the teacher looks like it was written by a bot. Compare notes with other students. If two students got exactly the same text, the teacher is outsourcing their own job to a program. Publicize that.
  • CitrusFruits 3y ago
    I don't think retaliation is going to benefit anyone here. If they wanted to be confrontational, I think a constructive approach where they have a conversation with the teacher about false positives in these tools would be better.
    • akira2501 3y ago
      Take your money elsewhere. Education should be a market. If you feel that "retaliation" is your only option, then you are mostly likely in a monopolized and non-functioning market. If you get good results, it will be due to luck, and not to anything that you've paid for.
      • vkou 3y ago
        > Take your money elsewhere. Education should be a market. You're absolutely right, and any participants in this market should be looking to maximize their grade per dollar spent. (What do you think they should be maximizing?)
        • akira2501 3y ago
          Do all institutions produce grades with identical value to employers? What happens when you have to maximize a function with more than one variable or order?
    • remram 3y ago
      The student is paying a lot of money here and the contracted party was just caught not doing their job. Working with them so the teacher is not caught when they use bullshit programs wrong in the future should really not be the goal. If I pay someone to check my car, and one day they tell me the windows were too dirty so they couldn't do their usual inspection from the outside... I don't clean the windows so they can continue doing their "inspection" without opening the car. I go elsewhere and report them as the risk to life and property that they are.
• pmarreck 3y ago
  I have always spelled really well (almost won a spelling bee) and as soon as personal computers became a thing, I realized how useless a "superpower" it was. And now it might become an actual liability as nearly perfect spelling/grammar is an easy attribute to hang "possibly AI-generated" on.
  • buggy6257 3y ago
    If perfect spelling/grammar was so easy to have the moment "personal computers became a thing", then why do my eyes bleed trying to read what people write online every day? We've had near-flawless spellcheck for years now. I think maybe it's not as much of a useless skill as you think it might be...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tipsytoad 3y ago
  I emphasize with the student here, but passing it through an ai detector yourself before submitting and keeping a version history seems like an easy way to combat any false claims.
  • BadCookie 3y ago
    I disagree that it is reasonable to expect students to follow your suggested process. The instructor is being ridiculous here. For one thing, one AI “detector” will not necessarily return the same result as another.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  Comical. Back in the day, when I had to write research papers I would go to Wikipedia by copying the citations verbatim, outline the page, and then essentially rewrite the whole thing in my voice but keeping the exact quotes from the original article since they were cited. At that point, 70% of the hard work is done and you're just regurgitating. Liberal arts is long dead.
  • esafak 3y ago
    So why did you study it?
    • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      I'm surprised people have to ask this. To clear a prerequisite requirement for the degree program which I considered a waste of time and money — the forced prerequisite that is.
  • vkou 3y ago
    Congratulations on... Cheating yourself out of actually researching the material? Of learning something? Why pay to go to school if you're just regurgitating a Wikipedia page? Wikipedia's free.
    • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      To bypass the obnoxious prompt HR wheenies use to filter job applicants, duh. As for feeling cheated, yeah I do feel cheated considering the astronomical tuition for BS make work prerequisite liberal arts classes. But the income i make nowadays covers it entirely. And I still learned something since I had to rewrite the Wikipedia article, but believe me there isn't anything to be learned grinding away doing regurgitation research. For the record, college liberal arts don't teach you how to think, they teach you WHAT to think and if you deviate from that you get a reduced grade. I wouldn't have qualms cheating my way into a degree program either if the opportunity presented itself. In world of cheats, thiefs, and late stage capitalism the honest man is the fool.
• 2ap 3y ago
  I am an educator at a UK university. The essay is rapidly ceasing to be an appropriate way to assess students knowledge and critical thinking. We regularly organise in person face to face practical exams for our entire several hundred strong year group of undergraduates. It is possible to do assessment properly if the will is there.
  • dan-robertson 3y ago
    When I was a student at a uk university, essays were, I think, written in examinations where one can’t easily use AI, as were most of the other things one would need for a degree. There was a small coursework component of my course and I think others. But I’m still a bit surprised — surely if you are getting a coursework essay from a history or English student or similar, the AI will be a worse writer and won’t have sufficiently detailed knowledge to write about the topic, so either the essay won’t really make any sense if you think about it (which you’d hope examiners would be able to tell) or the student will have done their own research and gotten the AI to form the students opinions into the essay, but they will then likely synthesise a much worse essay than the one the student could have written. Doing practicals seems good, and I think proctored examinations can add objectivity too.
    • 2ap 3y ago
      I agree - out of the box, a LLM will write an extremely poor essay. But that is not how to use the LLM. WHat you do, is give the topic to the LLM, and say, "with this topic, what are 20 titles that I could have for essays." Then, you pick the best title, and you then say, "I am writing an essay with the title <insert title>, what should the central argument for the essay be?" You then ask for a list of bullet points for the central theme of each paragraph to elaborate on that argument, then you ask it to write each paragraph individually, then you put the pieces together, and ask it to proof read it's own work and finally you add in some references of your own. Within 1/2 an hour, you have a passable essay. And if you then iterate on it with the LLM you can fairly soon have a half decent one, especially if it is a well trodden area (presumably with lots of training data that the LLM draws on). I tried to get students to critique things, but even then you can put in the text to critique to a LLM with a long enough context, and the LLM will kick off with a passable critique, if you iterate with it enough. So, even though they'll never get a top mark, they will still be able to get through the assessment. So I don't set essays any more.
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  This kind of thing infuriates me so much. Not only are the detectors not accurate, but the damned thing gave it a 27% score that it was written by an AI which means it actually predicted it WASN'T written as AI and this teacher is threatening their success over that. It's absolutely absurd.
  • saulpw 3y ago
    Right?! What's the maximum acceptable level of AI-ness, anyway? If I have an AI proofread my paper and suggest a few alternative turns of phrase which sound better to my ear but earn me a 7% AI score, is that okay?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• csours 3y ago
  It feels more and more like we need to rethink what scoring schoolwork means. Worksheets and exams can show how familiar you are with the material, or they can be gamed or useless in some other way. But the best they can ever do is show familiarity. What I really want as a consumer of someone's grade or academic history is how well they WORK in the subject area, along with how well they work with other people, not just a score that may correlate with regurgitation of facts. I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important. I also feel like this previous comment will be very emotional for some people.
  • smrtinsert 3y ago
    College admissions have known this for a long time which is why test scores aren't an automatic entrance. Your schools sound irresponsibly myopic.
    • zdragnar 3y ago
      Colleges are no different at the undergraduate level in many, if not most, courses. Identify what the professor wants to see or hear, repeat it back. Lab work is probably the biggest exception, in that you tend to need to apply some practical knowledge, but even then I found TAs were very willing to hold your hand through it if you at least demonstrated you had reviewed and memorized any prep materials.
  • Delk 3y ago
    > I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important. Which school is that? I guess that's probably true of primary or middle / lower secondary school, but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, let alone at university level. There might of course be quite a bit of variation between countries, schools and even individual teachers in this.
    • vkou 3y ago
      > but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, In my high school experience, most classes could be aced through rote regurgitation of facts. Math class required another step - identification of which category of problem you have, and rote application of one of a few pre-calc/calc algorithms.
• arthurofbabylon 3y ago
  Grades in university have done absolutely nothing for me. Good grades nor bad grades. What I got out of schooling was quite literally an education – access to perspectives and paradigms, learning methodologies, some expertise in a couple of fields, confidence in working with others. You know... learning. There's not a lot of value in using AI for targeted tasks like a school essay. Nor is there much value in getting a grade for a targeted task like an essay (not only would the grade be high-noise and low-signal, it also has a tiny or non-existent practical effect). I wonder if these AI tools will to some extent highlight the meaningless fluff (crust?) that vestigially hangs around. If our current incarnation of task-oriented AI is really good at some particular thing, and we humans readily hand that thing over to AI without regret/loss, what are the chances that that thing really mattered in the first place? (Note that this is not to hypothesize that all things AI does are non-important.) I personally believe that we have a weak grasp on the things we do that don't matter. We do a lot of things because we have always done them, and some of these have not been adequately questioned in years/decades. So any indication of what's important or not is very helpful. (I'm aware my circumstances are unique – maybe for some grades in school have had a significant influence in their lives – I personally have not witnessed this, in myself or others.)
• gizajob 3y ago
  *because I think the marker could also do with some improvement of their writing style.
• theknocker 3y ago
  [dead]
• justinclift 3y ago
  https://nitter.net/rustykitty_/status/1709316764868153537 https://nitter.net/rustykitty_/status/1709316764868153537
• reportgunner 3y ago
  How long are the first 9 lines of the first paragraph that the teacher gave the student 5 days to rewrite them ?
• phoebeannabel 3y ago
  [flagged]