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Kenyans Did College Students' Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived
- pseudolus 1mo agohttps://archive.ph/JkdMp https://archive.ph/JkdMp
- mc32 27d agoSo the unethical helping of unethical students is being subverted by unethical language models… What a world! I guess I should not be surprised by people being sympathetic to this “business model.”
- SoftTalker 27d agoThere will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
- atleastoptimal 27d agoWould it be more ethical to donate GPUs to Kenyans who can then host their own Kimi instances and then resell the tokens at a higher price?
- mc32 27d agoSo if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
- SoftTalker 27d agoMaybe not "in the clear" but somewhat more forgivable than Anthropic doing it. It's the old parable of whether it's unethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children.
- jeroenhd 27d agoThere's quite a difference between stealing a loaf of bread and making a career out of fraud to pay your way through college. Of course, this type of fraud is legal for the one doing the work, so even on that front the comparison doesn't really work. Beats scamming old people out of their retirement money, I guess, but not exactly a job that people will feel bad about disappearing.
- asdff 27d agoKenyans probably have new opportunities in reinforcement learning these days if we are being honest
- rwmj 27d agoNext up: Hard working romance scammers out of work after police shut down operations.
- mc32 27d agoSome people were upset when Craigslist cleaned up their classifieds, in fact.
- Animats 27d agoAmazon gave up on Mechanical Turk recently, too.[1] If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked. [1] https://www.mturk.com/help https://www.mturk.com/help
- pixl97 27d agoChuckles, I'm in danger.
- monster_truck 27d agoNever went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did. It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
- VladVladikoff 27d agoDon’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
- bananaflag 27d agoHave you heard of cheat sheets? Or looking at your neighbor during exam? Passing pieces of paper?
- sampullman 27d agoMany of my tests after a certain point were open book, or at least explicitly allowed a cheat sheet. It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
- econ 27d agoWe made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it. End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year. We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again. I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
- buildsjets 27d agoIn late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms. I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it. It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
- jandrese 27d agoHow come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
- vasco 27d ago"Man drums publicity up for his fake essay business for people that are too lazy to even use AI"
- robotnikman 27d agoTbh I kinda enjoyed writing essays in college if the topic was interesting.
- __rito__ 27d agoSame for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'. Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
- QuadmasterXLII 27d agoScandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
- tombert 27d agoI was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested. Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything. For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2]. [1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now. [2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
- Teknoman117 27d agoI didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them. Flattering, in a way.
- __sy__ 27d agoI had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.
- jeroenhd 27d agoWhat reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours. It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code. I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
- VBprogrammer 27d agoOur 2nd year CS maths course the answer sheets were all uploaded to the server with sequential numbers so it was trivial to grab them all.
- mike_hearn 27d agoLuckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code. It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
- BurningFrog 27d agoThe fact that cheating works is pretty damning for the utility of colleges.
- analog31 27d agoThe cheaters are supporting the students who choose to learn. In the past, this was the role of the rich kids who only needed a "gentleman's C"
- BurningFrog 27d agoIf half of graduates get their degree from learning and half from cheating, the degree isn't really worth much.
- analog31 27d agoThat's a fair point, but I think real learning is still worthwhile, and employers have always had to vet candidates beyond just the credential by itself.
- asdff 27d agoName something with an incentive to cheat that has completely nullified cheating. I won't wait because you can't really. People have cheated in everything there is to cheat in. Chess, college, interviews, shareholder meetings, congressional hearings, whatever the hell it is, someone has tried to game, subvert, cheat, and defeat. Does this damn the world? Maybe, if you are obtuse.
- Jtsummers 27d agoSchools have long relied on an honor system, unless you can get really close to a 1:1 ratio with the students so the instructor can properly evaluate each and every one. But, as a society, we've decided that's too expensive so people cheat and get away with it pretty easily.
- red_admiral 27d agoWhen AI watermark detection is properly up and running, there may yet be a market here. As long as the Kenyans don't try and use AI themselves.
- marssaxman 27d agoWhy would AI detection ever be any better in the future than it is today? All the money is on the other side of that arms race.
- gruez 26d agoBecause the major labs are stenographically marking their text outputs, similar to how image outputs are already wateremarked.
- __rito__ 27d agoThey are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
- drop_star 27d agoRIP CHEGG
- PeterStuer 27d agoDifference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
- specproc 27d agoI spent a lot of my life outside the English-speaking world, and this was a small sideline for a while. I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid. Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade. My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI. It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will. A case of AI pulling the ladder.
- xhkkffbf 27d agoThe article certainly signals that we're supposed to feel sympathy for the folks in Kenya. But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right? The next thing, we'll be asked to feel sympathy for moms who kill their kids.
- win311fwg 26d ago> But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right? In the same way a mom and pop pizza joint willingly serving someone who is trying to be on a strict healthy diet is helping people cheat, yes, but if McDonalds then rolled in and took away all their business, is there no room to feel sympathy for the loss of mom and pop's livelihood? It is not a binary situation.
- cheriot 27d agoSomething about large debts and widespread cheating makes me think we don't need so many students staying for 4 years. Maybe more coop programs and less class time.
- win311fwg 26d agoThat's just the cost of utilizing the dating service known as college. Being able to spend recklessly and manage other people to do one's busywork is what appeals within that dating market. Nobody wants to date a broke loser, so to speak. Maybe you don't technically need four years to find the "love of your life", but many people like to play the field, as they say, which takes time. People are, after all, there for four years because, on average, they want to be.
- caycep 27d agoI kinda wonder if there was some secondary educational benefit for the workers doing this
- tantalor 27d ago> helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish their [degree] What odd phrasing. Counterpoint: "Helping" them cheat actually harms them, by ensuring they get the degree without learning or demonstrating mastery of the subject. There's a good reason why students caught cheating are harshly punished.