3 ms·

I was accused of using AI in my dissertation but I wrote it all myself

31 points by tcp_handshaker 2mo ago

jjgreen 2mo ago
Just show them your hand-written initial draft
- rcbdev 2mo ago
  That could have been produced after the fact, and even if i.e. a scanned version were provided with an eIDAS-compliant qualified electronic timestamp, it can still be argued that the student just wrote LLM output down.
  - jjgreen 2mo ago
    It could, but it wouldn't, LLM cheats are lazy, and that sounds too much like work.
    - LoganDark 2mo ago
      It's less work than doing it over again for sure. People lazy enough to be efficient in the first place will typically do some work to avoid even more work.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jcarrano 2mo ago
18 years ago I was accused of plagiarizing an unnamed online monograph (I was never told which one) on an English literature exam that I wrote with pen and paper inside a classroom. It was a very weird experience.
cedws 2mo ago
AI “detection” tools should be banned. They have the potential to cause as much harm as AI plagiarism itself. Non technical people don’t understand the shortcomings of such tools, they treat the verdict as truth.
- add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
  If we're going to ban tools that are unreliable but people are starting to treat them like truth...
- JohnFen 2mo ago
  People also treat genAI outputs as truth. At least that mistake goes both ways.
LoganDark 2mo ago
I've seen people on HN mistake genuine writing for LLM output as well. It seems to be most common with Aspie writing, presumably because of their learning style. I think I've seen it happen two or three times?
- esperent 2mo ago
  > It seems to be most common with Aspie writing That's quite a claim, do you have any proof of this?
  - piltdownman 2mo ago
    The 'reliable heuristics' for identifying LLM output tend to pattern-match on technical lexicons, adherence to syntax at the cost of parsability, and atypically rigid punctuation and literary contrivances. Typically these form the same rulesett historically used to demarcate the aneurotypical - clear, direct and precise to the point of coming across as mechanical. Anybody familiar with ASD would wholly support the claim, and even the most cursory search validates it. https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1q4vh0z/autistic_daughters_writing_keeps_getting_flagged/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1q4vh0z/autistic_da... https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticAdults/comments/1n8hrf6/autistic_writers_who_get_told_they_sound_like_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticAdults/comments/1n8hrf6/aut... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/15sw3ei/have_you_been_mistaken_for_ai_in_education/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/15sw3ei/have_you_be... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1oh1kk9/update_just_had_a_college_paper_that_i_wrote/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1oh1kk9/update_just... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1vgboem/autistic_writing_style/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1vgboem/autistic_wr... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1f1n98g/does_anyone_else_write_like_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1f1n98g/does_anyone... Given a large curated corpus of Reddit posts, it was shown that those posted in autism-centric subreddits—presumably written by autistic people—were more likely than posts from other subreddits to be flagged as AI-generated by OpenAI’s GPT-2 detector. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.14729 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.14729 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410300817_The_Misclassification_of_Autistic_Writing_as_AI-Generated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410300817_The_Miscl... https://medium.com/illumination/when-my-writing-was-mistaken-for-ai-a-neurodivergent-reflection-on-authenticity-2bfae05eea60 https://medium.com/illumination/when-my-writing-was-mistaken... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-18/do-ai-detectors-work-students-face-false-cheating-accusations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-18/do-ai-det...
contubernio 2mo ago
My butcher is still bitter because forty years ago he studied very hard and passed latin but the teacher accused him of cheating and failed him in the grounds that a loutish thuggish kid like him couldn't possibly have studied that hard or learned latin. He still tells the story and still gets very angry while telling it. These kinds of things do enormous damage to people.
- gdulli 2mo ago
  We were warned very early on, by people more prescient than me, of all the secondary harms to society like this one that were going to come with LLMs. We can't be surprised.
CPLX 2mo ago
At some point, people will figure out that this doesn't matter. The more I use AI, and especially the more I have my team deliver work and documents to me using AI, the more I realize that the skill of producing high-quality written materials is intact and still is a human characteristic. If you can produce a high-quality dissertation, then you can produce one. That means that you can tell the difference between what the AI draft and great final output, because I'm real sure that AI can't produce something great already. And when it can produce great by today's standards, then raise the standards. I assume the standards must have been raised around the time that access to research libraries and then later online research tools became available.
jzer0cool 2mo ago
From article: > The marker's notes - seen by the BBC - raise concerns about the "polished/uniform tone" of the work, noting the "consistent flawless grammar and similar sentence structure with no variation in style". The notes also mention a "formulaic paragraph structure that follows a typical AI pattern of 'general claim, the example/result, and conclusion'." Other observations point to repetitive phrasing and a lack of "nuanced critique" as well as a high usage of "em" dashes, a type of punctuation thought to be favoured by AI models. Judging by the given remarks I see nothing here which proves AI use.
- yonatan8070 2mo ago
  Would you say there is any way to definitively prove a text is AI generated? I believe it's impossible to prove that some text was generated by an LLM simply due to the limitations of the medium. At the end of the day, text is just a sequence of bytes, and a keyboard can create a byte-identical sequence to an LLM generated one. Of course you can run various statistical tools, judge a text by gut feeling, or look for specific clues that LLMs usually generate more than humans (e.g. em dashes). But none of those will ever be a proof. Just indications, which together could add up to a very high likelihood. IMO, the only way to prove an LLM generated some text is to see the original chat session.
Grombobulous 2mo ago
If I was a student in today’s world I’d probably be tempted to just make my own elaborate surveillance setup to just record myself as I do all the work just in case my school administrators were this boneheaded.

jjgreen 2mo ago

Just show them your hand-written initial draft

rcbdev 2mo ago
That could have been produced after the fact, and even if i.e. a scanned version were provided with an eIDAS-compliant qualified electronic timestamp, it can still be argued that the student just wrote LLM output down.
- jjgreen 2mo ago
  It could, but it wouldn't, LLM cheats are lazy, and that sounds too much like work.
  - LoganDark 2mo ago
    It's less work than doing it over again for sure. People lazy enough to be efficient in the first place will typically do some work to avoid even more work.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jcarrano 2mo ago

18 years ago I was accused of plagiarizing an unnamed online monograph (I was never told which one) on an English literature exam that I wrote with pen and paper inside a classroom. It was a very weird experience.

cedws 2mo ago

AI “detection” tools should be banned. They have the potential to cause as much harm as AI plagiarism itself. Non technical people don’t understand the shortcomings of such tools, they treat the verdict as truth.

add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
If we're going to ban tools that are unreliable but people are starting to treat them like truth...
JohnFen 2mo ago
People also treat genAI outputs as truth. At least that mistake goes both ways.

LoganDark 2mo ago

I've seen people on HN mistake genuine writing for LLM output as well. It seems to be most common with Aspie writing, presumably because of their learning style. I think I've seen it happen two or three times?

esperent 2mo ago
> It seems to be most common with Aspie writing That's quite a claim, do you have any proof of this?
- piltdownman 2mo ago
  The 'reliable heuristics' for identifying LLM output tend to pattern-match on technical lexicons, adherence to syntax at the cost of parsability, and atypically rigid punctuation and literary contrivances. Typically these form the same rulesett historically used to demarcate the aneurotypical - clear, direct and precise to the point of coming across as mechanical. Anybody familiar with ASD would wholly support the claim, and even the most cursory search validates it. https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1q4vh0z/autistic_daughters_writing_keeps_getting_flagged/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1q4vh0z/autistic_da... https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticAdults/comments/1n8hrf6/autistic_writers_who_get_told_they_sound_like_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticAdults/comments/1n8hrf6/aut... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/15sw3ei/have_you_been_mistaken_for_ai_in_education/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/15sw3ei/have_you_be... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1oh1kk9/update_just_had_a_college_paper_that_i_wrote/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1oh1kk9/update_just... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1vgboem/autistic_writing_style/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1vgboem/autistic_wr... https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1f1n98g/does_anyone_else_write_like_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/1f1n98g/does_anyone... Given a large curated corpus of Reddit posts, it was shown that those posted in autism-centric subreddits—presumably written by autistic people—were more likely than posts from other subreddits to be flagged as AI-generated by OpenAI’s GPT-2 detector. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.14729 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.14729 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410300817_The_Misclassification_of_Autistic_Writing_as_AI-Generated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410300817_The_Miscl... https://medium.com/illumination/when-my-writing-was-mistaken-for-ai-a-neurodivergent-reflection-on-authenticity-2bfae05eea60 https://medium.com/illumination/when-my-writing-was-mistaken... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-18/do-ai-detectors-work-students-face-false-cheating-accusations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-18/do-ai-det...

contubernio 2mo ago

My butcher is still bitter because forty years ago he studied very hard and passed latin but the teacher accused him of cheating and failed him in the grounds that a loutish thuggish kid like him couldn't possibly have studied that hard or learned latin. He still tells the story and still gets very angry while telling it. These kinds of things do enormous damage to people.

gdulli 2mo ago
We were warned very early on, by people more prescient than me, of all the secondary harms to society like this one that were going to come with LLMs. We can't be surprised.

CPLX 2mo ago

At some point, people will figure out that this doesn't matter. The more I use AI, and especially the more I have my team deliver work and documents to me using AI, the more I realize that the skill of producing high-quality written materials is intact and still is a human characteristic. If you can produce a high-quality dissertation, then you can produce one. That means that you can tell the difference between what the AI draft and great final output, because I'm real sure that AI can't produce something great already. And when it can produce great by today's standards, then raise the standards. I assume the standards must have been raised around the time that access to research libraries and then later online research tools became available.

jzer0cool 2mo ago

From article: > The marker's notes - seen by the BBC - raise concerns about the "polished/uniform tone" of the work, noting the "consistent flawless grammar and similar sentence structure with no variation in style". The notes also mention a "formulaic paragraph structure that follows a typical AI pattern of 'general claim, the example/result, and conclusion'." Other observations point to repetitive phrasing and a lack of "nuanced critique" as well as a high usage of "em" dashes, a type of punctuation thought to be favoured by AI models. Judging by the given remarks I see nothing here which proves AI use.

yonatan8070 2mo ago
Would you say there is any way to definitively prove a text is AI generated? I believe it's impossible to prove that some text was generated by an LLM simply due to the limitations of the medium. At the end of the day, text is just a sequence of bytes, and a keyboard can create a byte-identical sequence to an LLM generated one. Of course you can run various statistical tools, judge a text by gut feeling, or look for specific clues that LLMs usually generate more than humans (e.g. em dashes). But none of those will ever be a proof. Just indications, which together could add up to a very high likelihood. IMO, the only way to prove an LLM generated some text is to see the original chat session.

Grombobulous 2mo ago

If I was a student in today’s world I’d probably be tempted to just make my own elaborate surveillance setup to just record myself as I do all the work just in case my school administrators were this boneheaded.