A whole new ballgame in cheating. Introducing ChatGPT

[Caracal]

Caught my first AI essay. It was a trainwreck of random attributions and citations, nand not very on-topic. My student didn't put much work into it.

I don't normally bother reporting plagiarists, but I'll be reporting this one.

How did you discover it was AI and not just regular plagiarism?

The main hint was the structure of the paper, which is cut up into small sections that you can generate with just basic prompts (clearly derived from section titles). The weirdness and garbling of the attributions and the citations, too, are just not at all what you would see from material either generated by a student (I have never seen anything quite like it, and my students often do a very poor job of relating class content) or taken from someone else's work. The huggingface detector confirmed my intuition, and I'll be having a conversation with the student which I expect will seal the deal.

Good to know. My worry isn't really that AI is on the verge of writing good papers, but that it might be able to reproduce a C paper that can get a crummy student a B in the course, but it doesn't seem to be able to do that successfully yet either.

[marshwiggle]

Caught my first AI essay. It was a trainwreck of random attributions and citations, nand not very on-topic. My student didn't put much work into it.

I don't normally bother reporting plagiarists, but I'll be reporting this one.

How did you discover it was AI and not just regular plagiarism?

The main hint was the structure of the paper, which is cut up into small sections that you can generate with just basic prompts (clearly derived from section titles). The weirdness and garbling of the attributions and the citations, too, are just not at all what you would see from material either generated by a student (I have never seen anything quite like it, and my students often do a very poor job of relating class content) or taken from someone else's work. The huggingface detector confirmed my intuition, and I'll be having a conversation with the student which I expect will seal the deal.

Good to know. My worry isn't really that AI is on the verge of writing good papers, but that it might be able to reproduce a C paper that can get a crummy student a B in the course, but it doesn't seem to be able to do that successfully yet either.

Which is why a B in a course will mean less and less. Like any place where technology can replicate mediocre work, the human workers that survive will be those with real skills; the also-rans will be replaced.

[Parasaurolophus]

I think it could have been a C or B paper. But the student would have had to put in some work to prompt the AI properly, and the kind of student who's going to resort to using an AI to write their paper (or plagiarize) is not the kind of student who's ready to put in the kind of work that would be required. Their plagiarism attempts are really sad, too.

[marshwiggle]

I think it could have been a C or B paper. But the student would have had to put in some work to prompt the AI properly, and the kind of student who's going to resort to using an AI to write their paper (or plagiarize) is not the kind of student who's ready to put in the kind of work that would be required. Their plagiarism attempts are really sad, too.

That's pretty much the way it has always been with cheating; to cheat well requires a lot of work, but since cheaters are lazy, they usually cheat badly.

There was an Agatha Christie novel, called "The Secret Adversary", as I recall, where the villain said that if someone really clever went into crime seriously, they could be very successful. (They'd have to be pretty industrious as well.)

[Sun_Worshiper]

I think it could have been a C or B paper. But the student would have had to put in some work to prompt the AI properly, and the kind of student who's going to resort to using an AI to write their paper (or plagiarize) is not the kind of student who's ready to put in the kind of work that would be required. Their plagiarism attempts are really sad, too.

That's pretty much the way it has always been with cheating; to cheat well requires a lot of work, but since cheaters are lazy, they usually cheat badly.

There was an Agatha Christie novel, called "The Secret Adversary", as I recall, where the villain said that if someone really clever went into crime seriously, they could be very successful. (They'd have to be pretty industrious as well.)

The bolded is so true.

[apl68]

Caught my first AI essay. It was a trainwreck of random attributions and citations, nand not very on-topic. My student didn't put much work into it.

I don't normally bother reporting plagiarists, but I'll be reporting this one.

How did you discover it was AI and not just regular plagiarism?

The main hint was the structure of the paper, which is cut up into small sections that you can generate with just basic prompts (clearly derived from section titles). The weirdness and garbling of the attributions and the citations, too, are just not at all what you would see from material either generated by a student (I have never seen anything quite like it, and my students often do a very poor job of relating class content) or taken from someone else's work. The huggingface detector confirmed my intuition, and I'll be having a conversation with the student which I expect will seal the deal.

Good to know. My worry isn't really that AI is on the verge of writing good papers, but that it might be able to reproduce a C paper that can get a crummy student a B in the course, but it doesn't seem to be able to do that successfully yet either.

Which is why a B in a course will mean less and less. Like any place where technology can replicate mediocre work, the human workers that survive will be those with real skills; the also-rans will be replaced.

And the students who pull this sort of stuff don't realize that their coast-through-on-minimal-effort mentality is likely to turn them into also-rans.  They're ultimately cheating themselves.

[Wahoo Redux]

Cheating on a professional scale...

...and getting caught:

MSN Fired Its Human Journalists and Replaced Them With AI That Publishes Fake News About Mermaids and Bigfoot

MSN's seemingly nonexistent editorial standards illustrate the perils of the contemporary media industry. In particular, recent years have seen Microsoft embrace an increasingly callous and cynical strategy toward the site: in 2020, for instance, it gutted MSN by firing dozens of workers, including journalists, editors, and other production staff, vowing to replace them with automated systems instead.

"I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am," one fired MSN staffer told The Guardian at the time. "AI has taken my job."

That anonymous staffer imparted a prescient warning: that though the human team had employed close editorial guidelines to vet the material that appeared on MSN's site, the new automated system would likely struggle to bring the same level of nuance and skepticism.

MSN makes lofty promises that there's still "human oversight" over the stories it syndicates, but given the desultory deluge of fake nonsense it appears to run constantly, it seems very unlikely that the site's remaining skeleton crew is accomplishing much at all.

[ciao_yall]

The LA Times decided to take actual Hallmark Movie titles and use ChatGPT to generate images and plot synopses.


You're welcome.

[Wahoo Redux]

NBC News: New bot ChatGPT will force colleges to get creative to prevent cheating, experts say

[waterboy]

I guess we could stop requiring essays and go back (?) to oral exams.  Wouldn't that be fun...

[dismalist]

I guess we could stop requiring essays and go back (?) to oral exams.  Wouldn't that be fun...

I used to work at a place that gave oral exams before graduation. I often examined the international trade course. The theory consists, inter alia, of four theorems, each named. One of them is called the Rybczynski theorem after its originator. When I would get a real loser of a student in the oral exam who got nothing right, I would finally ask: How do you spell Rybczynski?

Not that it helped.

[Caracal]

NBC News: New bot ChatGPT will force colleges to get creative to prevent cheating, experts say

I tried it for an in class essay question. This was the kind of very broad question I often ask. The answer I got back wouldn't have set off any alarms for me with cheating. It actually looks quite a lot like really bad in class essays my students often write. The app made no actual argument, it just turned around the question and there was no actual claim made anywhere except the one assumed in the question. It cited no evidence, or any particulars at all. Again, this is a lot like many of my students who also haven't been in class or paid attention and didn't read the instructions on how to write in class essays.

There's really no existential threat to essays here...

[apl68]

NBC News: New bot ChatGPT will force colleges to get creative to prevent cheating, experts say

I tried it for an in class essay question. This was the kind of very broad question I often ask. The answer I got back wouldn't have set off any alarms for me with cheating. It actually looks quite a lot like really bad in class essays my students often write. The app made no actual argument, it just turned around the question and there was no actual claim made anywhere except the one assumed in the question. It cited no evidence, or any particulars at all. Again, this is a lot like many of my students who also haven't been in class or paid attention and didn't read the instructions on how to write in class essays.

There's really no existential threat to essays here...

So, it won't help them to cheat their way to better grades, it will merely enable them to flunk or get a bare pass without even the minimal effort they had been making?  It's still concerning to think that students may be able to use this tool to scrape a pass.  Especially in their elementary comp classes.  If they had to do some actual work to pass, there's a chance they'd learn something, in spite of themselves.

[Wahoo Redux]

NBC News: New bot ChatGPT will force colleges to get creative to prevent cheating, experts say

I tried it for an in class essay question. This was the kind of very broad question I often ask. The answer I got back wouldn't have set off any alarms for me with cheating. It actually looks quite a lot like really bad in class essays my students often write. The app made no actual argument, it just turned around the question and there was no actual claim made anywhere except the one assumed in the question. It cited no evidence, or any particulars at all. Again, this is a lot like many of my students who also haven't been in class or paid attention and didn't read the instructions on how to write in class essays.

There's really no existential threat to essays here...

Don't forget that this technology will rapidly improve, especially now that the Streisand effect is undoubtedly taking root with students.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I have to respectfully disagree with Caracal and anyone else who thinks this is not a serious challenge to academic integrity on several levels. The technology, in its current form, can easily write an essay that is just as good as those written by most students, and the technology underlying this will improve exponentially in the coming years. Soon enough it won't just be students using AI to write papers that they pass off as their own, but also their professors, not to mention writers outside of academia.

As for new tools to detect it, we will soon have those as well.