Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI 115
Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows. A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.
Duh (Score:3)
EOM
Millions of losers (Score:4, Insightful)
Students that do not actually want to learn things should not be students.
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Students that do not actually want to learn things should not be students.
Yup. That "hard earned sheepskin" is now just another participation trophy
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Yup. That "hard earned sheepskin" is now just another participation trophy
That ship sailed long ago. At my kids' high school, 80% of grades are A's.
Students appear to be learning as much as ever, but grades no longer provide much useful information. An "A" can mean the top 1% or barely above the bottom 20%.
Re: Millions of losers (Score:4, Interesting)
It's intentional. There are factions that don't want anything to do with a meritocracy. One end of the spectrum feels that categorizing people based on their performance is a form of prejudice or discrimination. People on the other end of the spectrum want money to be the only metric that matters so that they can accumulate power and pass it onto heirs.
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Additionally, the inevitable "washback effect" of this is that students are no longer rewarded for studying, i.e. t
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The problem is textbooks and tests written to Texas standards of education.
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The UK, however, is an outlier in this respect, having equally low standards of foreign language education. Attitudes to speaking foreig
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If you are an English native you have to pick one of many (MANY) languages to study and all you really get out of it is the ability to converse with the natives of that country. If you are a native speaker of any other language, English gives you access to pretty much EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE PLANET. Especially useful in business. One requires passion to pursue the knowledge largely for the sake of it, the other is something of massive value.
Put another way, if I only have the capacity to learn one other
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The problem is textbooks and tests written to Texas standards of education.
You should have seen the poor quality of books used in California schools back in the 70s. Seesh! Talk about Easy "A" material ... in CALCULUS no less.
And yes, I moved there from a school with much more rigorous academic standards because my parents decided that was the best place to get a divorce.
So much for that old trope But Think Of The Children ...
Re: Millions of losers (Score:2)
Re:Millions of losers (Score:5, Insightful)
Students that do not actually want to learn things should not be students.
Some people don't want to learn things, they just want to earn money. There are quite a few career paths where a substantial part of the requisite education just feels like you're being told to figuratively jump up and down on one leg, not because the job requires such a skill, but simply to weed out the folks who didn't have the patience for it.
Yes, there's an argument to be made that spending time learning things that aren't directly related to the job you're pursuing makes you a more well-rounded individual. There's also plenty of careers where if you slept through class you'll end up doing your job very poorly (with the medical field comes to mind). Again though, some people just don't give a crap about bettering themselves, they're after a paycheck; education is just a means to that end. Considering that I could certainly point out a few very wealthy folks who don't seem to be all that well educated (or they did get an education and it obviously didn't stick with them), it's entirely possible to be both successful and an idiot.
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Some people don't want to learn things
Or perhaps they want to learn different things.
When I was in college, my friend wrote my English essays, and I did her math and programming assignments.
She realized (correctly) that she'd never use calculus once she left school, and I had no interest in writing a 10-page essay on "Shakespeare and the semicolon."
Re: Millions of losers (Score:2)
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Some people don't want to learn things
Or perhaps they want to learn different things.
When I was in college, my friend wrote my English essays, and I did her math and programming assignments.
She realized (correctly) that she'd never use calculus once she left school, and I had no interest in writing a 10-page essay on "Shakespeare and the semicolon."
Is it your premise that only the things you are interested in at the moment are worthwhile learning?
If I could impart one bit of advice (not that anyone would take it) it is that there is very little in this world that is not worth learning. I've been able to dredge up knowledge from things I learned in the past that would seem to have no relevance to anything I was doing now. But it does.
disclaimer - I was "that kid", the one who read the encyclopedia for fun. Others might not be able to focus on anyt
Re:Millions of losers (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people don't want to learn things, they just want to earn money.
That's not innate, that's learnt. That's shared social & cultural values. If you tell everyone that the only thing that matters is money, that's what you get.
I think a lot of people don't get that Aristotle was being ironic when he was asked whether he'd prefer to be rich or wise. He said rich because rich men have a multitude of wise men knocking at his door offering their services. The irony is, how do you tell if someone is wise or not if you're stupid yourself?
US & capitalist culture more generally are an abhorrent distortion of what it is to be human. It brings out the worst in all of us.
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Yep, that nicely sums it up.
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Who is Aristotle? :-)
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While I agree, these people should not be given the opportunity to be "students". They have no business getting any academic degree. Open, say, "business schools" that do not award academic degrees, but, say, "Competent Paper Pusher" and like trade-"qualifications".
well-rounded good idea in the past but not at 80K+ (Score:2)
well-rounded good idea in the past but not at 80K+ at today costs!
Re: Millions of losers (Score:2)
Demand hand written papers.
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Institutions that care about the skills of their graduates will probably have to do that. Also, written tests on paper with no Internet access or tests to be done on isolated computers provided by the institution.
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Hey you students, (Score:2)
Get off the quadrangle in front of the building!
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I would be all for it. In my experience they are a lot more fair. They are just more expensive to do and examiners need to have some actual skills doing examinations.
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But they are learning something. They are learning how to craft prompts for LLMs.
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We might eventually have to rethink what it means to be a student. It used to be a status symbol for the wealthy, then it was found that education produced economic productivity so it became a right, then the paperwork became a prerequisite for employment, so it became a necessity... and when something is a necessity, people will figure out a way handle it in such a way that moves them towards what they actually want : a well paying job.
Some will. Along the pathway to making a college education being grades 13 through 16, a lot of people were mesmerized by having a degree - any degree - made you an ubermensch,So a whole lot of young people that perhaps were not college material ended up taking one of the opinion majors, which a doctorate in made them qualified ot replace the present instructor. A bit of a math issue when you might have 500 students in that major.
The amount of job prospects a person has is related to their ability to pro
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What is an "opinion major"? If you have an opinion and can articulate it, you pass?
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What is an "opinion major"? If you have an opinion and can articulate it, you pass?
More or less yes. Think Philosophy. or Gender studies - complete opinion. And there are ones with more or less opinion at base, like Psychology, and Communications. Some would say all the Liberal Arts, but that's not really true. Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Geology are all liberal arts, Anthropology uses a mixture of several different LA groups. And some like Chemistry are very lucrative fields. The other ones I mentioned in that last list are heavily science based, and a person can make a living off of
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Gender Studies, yes. Communications, no if taught right. And the rest you cite are just regular Science, nothing "opinion" about them if taught properly and yes, that does include Philosophy.
false positives (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:false positives (Score:4, Insightful)
No one cares. This is no different than those 'plagiarism detectors' that are all the rage these days. Students will just make changes until their work falls under whatever threshold they need to satisfy the system.
Until we're willing to completely rethink assessment, this is as good as it gets.
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Students don't know which plagiarism or AI detector is being used, they only get one try. A student in my place (in 2019) got a full year of studies cancelled (needed to be repeated) because plagiarism was detected in one of his assignments. The existence of plagiarism/AI detection software works as a deterrence method.
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That seems unlikely given the absurdly high false-positive rate you get out of these things. You wouldn't have any students left by the end of the semester!
How it works everywhere I've been involved, students submit their work though an online portal which provides them with a plagiarism score a few minutes later. They can then review their work to see what the system flagged. Above a certain threshold, the system (or policy, depending on the institution) won't allow the assignment to be graded, requiring
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It is quite counter productive.
If you put an eloquent piece of literature, or even the US Constitution, those "AI detectors" will tell it is not human written (this is separate from plagiarism detectors, which has their own issues).
What does this push students to?
Yes, of course, much worse writing.
Only sloppy writing, with significant amount of improper use, can pass those AI filters. Because, they will not be "generic" but have "character".
This is a very bad development, just on top of the 3 years of faile
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No one cares. This is no different than those 'plagiarism detectors' that are all the rage these days. Students will just make changes until their work falls under whatever threshold they need to satisfy the system.
Until we're willing to completely rethink assessment, this is as good as it gets.
Oh, they'll get a way with it right up until the detection technology improves a few years later, they get exposed and find themselves in a world of shit. The ability to think more than zero steps ahead actually counts for something.
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Why not just ask the AI to write a essay that cant be detected as written by AI? problem solved. :)
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Kids these days. (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day, if you wanted to cheat, you had to work for it.
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Back in my day, if you wanted to cheat, you had to work for it.
Dang straight.
Jokes aside, copying and rewriting encyclopedias - or sometimes even source materials - was probably actually pretty educational. It's not as though we were doing original research for whatever the heck we were writing about anyway.
Generative AI, alas, is automating things just a step too far.
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You joke, but it's true. I was a teacher for a few years and Canada and went though all the teacher education and training. There's a lot of theory out there, but in practice, I genuinely don't think there is any better than exams.
A lot of people will say things like exams are too much pressure. Some learners don't perform well on exams...
Exams do one thing really well. They give you a closed environment on the course material. Sure, you can cheat on any assignment or essay during the regular school year. Y
Here's How You Fix It (Score:3)
We are in a post-employment society. The world of jobs and resumes and all the associated bullshit is obsolete. Students should be equipped to leave it behind.
For openers, any student who doesn't want to go to school any more should be allowed to drop out. That will solve half the problem right there.
Those that remain should be allowed to choose what they want to study. The only three mandatory subjects should be reading, basic arithmetic and civics.
Third, curricula should be updated to reflect subjects relevant to the 21st century like finance and accounting, computers, entrepreneurship, journalism and how to use a library for research.
There should also be a trade track for things like carpentry, farming, plumbing, machine/auto shop, etc.
Students who actually want to do the work don't cheat.
Ideally at least half the students that graduate should be equipped to start their own business. Problem solved.
Re:Here's How You Fix It (Score:4, Insightful)
curricula should be updated to reflect subjects relevant to the 21st century like finance and accounting, computers, entrepreneurship, journalism and how to use a library for research
Which 21st century are you living in? Libraries as a center of research? Essentially all new written content (science, fiction, etc) is born digital, and physical copies of it are a secondary distribution medium. The only context in which libraries are a practical source of research material is legacy publications that have yet to be digitized - and the list of those shrinks on a daily basis as various archival projects keep gnawing away at the backlog.
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Yeah. Libraries. They have these things called books which you can use to learn about important things that happened before 2013.
Perhaps if we encouraged their use a little more often, we wouldn't have half the adult population living as functional illiterates.
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I repeat: the content that was first published on paper is rapidly being digitized. Heck, even most (all?) public libraries now have digital loan options for a lot of their catalog. The era of _needing_ to go into a house of paper to find information has gone, unless you are doing some very specialized research into rare books that have not been digitized (possibly because they are too delicate to do so, or because their owners refuse to let it happen). Not many average citizens need to get into the secret
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Agreed - I haven't been to a library or held a physical book in my hand in probably over a decade. Does that make me an illiterate prole because I haven't been to a library in that long?
Why should I need one when I have much more information on my computer? We are living in the 1950's science fiction age almost, where everybody has a "terminal" - and on mine I read Charles Babbages' "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" - I would be suprised if my local library carried such a book.
Nobody needs to physic
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Re:Here's How You Fix It (Score:4, Interesting)
For openers, any student who doesn't want to go to school any more should be allowed to drop out. That will solve half the problem right there.
The students that drop out still need to earn some sort of a living. We can't grind them up and make them into Soylent Green (that'd be morally abhorrent), and it's extremely unlikely that we'd be able to implement some sort of a UBI system so they can be paid to sit on their asses while the rest of society has to pull its own weight plus that of the drop-outs. I'm thinking that realistically under your proposed scheme, we'll do absolutely nothing and let the drop-outs become criminals, then throw them in jail. That is how you wash your hands of the responsibility, isn't it?
Question is, would you really want to live in the resulting society?
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> The students that drop out still need to earn some sort of a living.
That's nice. Not my responsibility.
> we'll do absolutely nothing and let the drop-outs become criminals
First of all that's a false dilemma. But better if that happens off campus so the students who do want to attend can accomplish something.
> That is how you wash your hands of the responsibility, isn't it?
It was never my responsibility to begin with.
> Question is, would you really want to live in the resulting society?
Only dif
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First of all that's a false dilemma.
Well, I'll admit that you'll likely get a mix of outcomes in addition to some of the drop-outs turning to crime. A few students will manage to beat the odds and become successful even without an education, some will become depressed and take their own lives, and there'll be those that after receiving a dose of reality decide to go back to school. The criminals though, are the ones who will have the most negative impact upon society.
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Ideally at least half the students that graduate should be equipped to start their own business. Problem solved.
Yeah just go out to the money tree and take out a loan. Then I get the joy of having no health insurance or paying $3000 a month for a basic plan.
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Or just reverse what you do at home and at school.
Do your "homework" and essay writing at school. You can use whatever resources the teacher allows. At home, you do the prepwork for the next lesson - listen to lectures or whatever.
That way you can use the assigned materials, or you can also seek out other learning materials that might help you understand the concepts as well. This can include the use of AI with the caveat that well, you need to be careful if its making stuff up.
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A post-employment society? Really? Who is giving you the money you need to make your car and house / rent payments? What money are you using to buy your groceries? All that money is just magically landing in your lap? Right.
There will never be a post-employment society. Money, and the things it buys, doesn't "grow on trees." Somebody will have to work to make things happen, and somebody will have to be paid for that work. Always.
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> Who is giving you the money you need to make your car and house / rent payments?
My customers.
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Oh, so you're employed then, because you have customers!
You might be self-employed, but that's still a form of employment.
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any student who doesn't want to go to school any more should be allowed to drop out
How many students ever, *wanted* to go to school?
OK, yeah, there were always a few nerds like me who actually liked school. But the thing is, children don't have the experience and wisdom necessary to make such an impactful choice. That's why we have *parents*--people whose job it is to look out for the well-being of their children, until they have enough maturity to make their own decisions. That's why we have different legal rules for minors vs. adults, and why we have legal guardians for minors. We all r
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Most of the US is experiencing a general labor shortage.
There's a shortage of laborers who are willing to do shitty jobs for shitty salaries. Job openings that pay decently, as defined by being able to afford the average median home mortgage payment, are still few and far between. Plus, because thanks to a surprisingly large number of voters not understanding how inflation works, even that $15/hr minimum wage (which was all the rage a few years ago with the Bernie supporters) now sucks*.
* If you're paying for groceries or housing, it doesn't go anywhere near a
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My personal hypothesis on why we're having that is because of an ongoing societal change towards living alone whilst having bigger housing, amplified by relatively easy to get home loans.
It couldn't possibly be corporations buying up tens of thousands of homes, https://www.fastcompany.com/91... [fastcompany.com] wages being stagnant, and the sheer greed of a handful of companies that control the economy https://cdn-images-1.medium.co... [medium.com] ?
Re: Here's How You Fix It (Score:2)
I'm sure it plays some role, but I don't see what companies that sell consumer staples have to do with housing. Unless the fact that pepsi cola and mountain dew are two brands owned by the same company keeps you up at night and makes you feel scared to live in your own home if somebody brings over a can of either? That must be it, otherwise there's no reason to bring it up.
Probably also worth mentioning that the company whose logo you have prominently displayed as a 6 inch tattoo just above your ass crack i
When your business depends on finding AI, (Score:2)
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then every paper ever written will look like it was written by AI.
Which will then be used by future LLMs as training data. It's AI all the way down!
[checking my watch] (Score:3)
Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI
Wonder how long until they generate the complete works of William Shakespeare [wikipedia.org].
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Wonder how long until they generate the complete works of William Shakespeare [wikipedia.org].
This inspired me to have ChatGPT write a poem comparing the former president to a summer's day. [pastebin.com] Shakespeare, it ain't.
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Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI
Wonder how long until they generate the complete works of William Shakespeare [wikipedia.org].
Are these the million monkeys I kept hearing about in philosophy class?
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*Infinite* monkeys on *infinite* typewriters. And must be typewriters, not computers, otherwise the monkeys may wander through internet and get distracted.
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The joke back in the '90s was: "We used to say that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but now we have the Internet and know that's not so."
Just let them use AI (Score:2)
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I don't think that the point of writing assignments is to produce documents as a product. It's to have the student go through the process of gathering, analyzing and understanding the material, in order for them to learn it. If they skip that work, they learn little or nothing.
In the real world, being effective in directing a computer to produce a bunch of text that you know nothing about is not a worthwhile skill. If someone comes back with issues related to the AI-generated content, how would you address
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Re:Just let them use AI (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about specifics but basic thought processes, of which without such fundamental skills you simply won't be equipped to self educate when you encounter something new.
Might as well relabel the next generation as monkeys. They can be trained to push a button just as well.
Maths (Score:3)
"Doing basic arithmetic in your head is a party trick, not a useful skill."
You shouldn't need a calculator to multiply six by nine.
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That's ok (Score:2)
The teachers are also using AI to grade the papers.
Garbage Service (Score:2)
for garbage teachers and/or school districts. Turnitin has always been a terrible service. It wasn't good 15 years ago, it's not good now. But they successfully dupe teachers and school districts into paying them somehow.
There's an easy answer to this problem (Score:3)
Go back to old fashioned, closed-book exams that include essay questions requiring real knowledge of course material and the ability to string together a basic essay.
If you're one of those people who doesn't do well under pressure, that's a shame. You probably won't do fabulously well in the real world, either.
Schools could even go a step further and give two marks for an essay. The higher mark would be awarded only if a student's performance on the exam demonstrated knowledge of the course material congruent with their essays.
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Or we could teach students a lot more stuff now that they have AI to assist them. What if we didn't teach CAD and forced kids to use a slide-rule and pencil? Maybe people can be more polymath if they had AI helping them. What's the difference between storing an algorithm in your brain's neurons versus DRAM in a computer?
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What's the difference between storing an algorithm in your brain's neurons versus DRAM in a computer?
The difference is that you know it in the first case, where in the second you don't.
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You need more than a slide rule and a pencil to replace CAD, unless you're abusing your slide rule by also using it as a straight edge for drawing.
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> Blathers on about "real world this and that"
Last I checked, in the "real world" you had access to any and all the information you need, which a closed book exam is the antithesis to.
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Unless you're doing fairly basic physical work, you're not going to keep your job for long if you constantly spend time looking stuff up. That applies to both blue and white collar employment, by the way. Would I be correct to assume you and the "real world" aren't close acquaintances?
1% failure rate is horrible? (Score:2)
so 200 million documents reviewed with a "less than 1% failure rate" (whatever that means) is 2 million times a student will be falsely accused of "cheating"
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AI is training people nowadays (Score:2)
Non-native speakers need to be eloquent (Score:2)
My ukrainian wife runs everything through chatGPT as if it was a spell checker. Data speaks for itself. It doesn't matter if you use Google translate or even a grammar checker that came with Word 20 years ago. My English teacher refused to accept my homework because I used a fucking THESAURUS to change some words for fancier ones and said it was too good to be true and that's not the level of fluency I usually demonstrate in class.
How is it affectig paper mills? (Score:2)
Students who were too lazy to write their own papers would get paper mills to do their work. I wonder if they are substituting AI for paper mills or if paper mills continue being used as premium service.
Meh (Score:2)
If you can get GPT or whatever to summarize a topic in the right format, with good details, and I can't tell it's AI-generated... fucking good for you. If the GPT output is garbage, it will be obvious or won't net a good grade, and it's a non-issue anyway.
The student may not learn the intended information, but that will work itself out. If that was information the student needed to succeed in tests or other work down the line, they won't h
That shit company is still here? (Score:2)
Ahh yes, Let me trust the shithole company that flags every paper as plagiarized because other papers have used the same properly formatted citations .
I'm sure NOBODY else has ever written the same citation line in a very specific format that will make the lines exactly the same in every paper that references another paper if done correctly...
I'm sure the detection they are doing is fool proof, absolutely fool proof I tell you!
Of course they are. (Score:2)
Transference! (Score:2)
If you learned how to do your job with AI, I can probably get AI to do your job.
Back in the day they plagiarized the nerds. (Score:2)
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Plagiarizing nerds had a limited window. Eventually somebody advancing in that way failed out. Now you can coast on it right through - these nerds never grow stronger, and never file assault charges.
A new digital dowsing rod (Score:2)
Always the same (Score:2)
OMG students are using calculators! ...
OMG students are using spellcheckers!
OMG students are using Grammar checkers!
OMG students are using a thesaurus!
OMG students are using Wikipedia!
OMG students are using citation guides!