[HN Gopher] It Wasn't AI
___________________________________________________________________
It Wasn't AI
Author : dbrereton
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-05-15 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (itwasntai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (itwasntai.com)
| aripickar wrote:
| IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being
| able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor
| (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into
| a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all
| of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be
| detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole
| essays, or if someone is actually typing and revising the essay
| until it is submitted. Essays that are just turned in in general
| are probably going to be a thing of the past.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Instead of spyware, just issue mechanical typewriters.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| My wife started teaching a class at the local university. She
| had a bunch of positives on the anti-plagiarism software used
| by the university. She ran a bunch of papers by me and man,
| analyzing the results are an art within it's self. People will
| unconsciously remember and write down phrases and smaller
| sentences they have read all the time. A little highlight here
| and there just has to be accepted. Then there are the papers
| that almost the entire thing is highlighted. It's the ones in
| between that are tricky as hell. A lot could have gone either
| way and it's a judgement call on the teacher whether to send it
| to the administration for review. I expect AI will just make it
| more difficult or hand writing is going to be the new hot
| subject taught to new levels in elementary...
| jfghi wrote:
| To me it seems like academic papers force people to back up
| every statement with a quote and agree with assigned
| readings. This style of writing leads to unoriginal results.
| skybrian wrote:
| Isn't that how non-fiction is supposed to work? It's about
| finding interesting evidence that adds up to something, not
| making stuff up.
|
| Though, ideally by finding interesting evidence in books
| that aren't in the assigned reading.
| jfghi wrote:
| It is, but I think that it would lead to a lot of false
| positives for automated plagiarism detection.
| bryzaguy wrote:
| This is a fantastic idea
| chrismorgan wrote:
| This is a horrible idea.
| plastic3169 wrote:
| Maybe you connect to school chat AI and then it probes you for
| knowledge. Same AI watches you write essay type bits and helps
| you out if you get something wrong. Teacher will get report how
| well you did and how present you were.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| You would need to ensure that Chrome extensions and keyboards
| with macros were disabled somehow
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Maybe, but I doubt it. Spyware-based systems are doomed to
| failure as other commenters note. There's nothing you can do to
| prove the text came from a human. Faking inputs is extremely
| easy. People will sell a $20 USB dongle that does appropriate
| keyboard/mouse things. Worst case, people can simply type in
| the AI generated essay by hand and/or crib from it directly.
|
| Schools are going to have to look at _why_ take home work is
| prescribed, and _if_ it should be part of a grading system at
| all. My hunch is that it probably shouldn 't be, and even
| though it's a big change it's probably something they can
| navigate.
|
| I predict more in-person learning interactions.
| function_seven wrote:
| It's a cat-and-mouse game for sure. At the first level, any
| dongle that simply types the AI response through a fake HID
| device will be easy to detect. No real essay writer just
| types an entire document in one go, with no edits. They move
| paragraphs around, expand some, delete others, etc.
|
| So this dongle will have to convincingly start with a worse
| version that's too short (or too long!). It'll have to pipe
| the GPT output through another process to mangle it, then
| "un" mangle it like a human would as they revise and update.
|
| If trained on the user's own previous writings, it can
| convincingly align the AI's response with the voice and tone
| of the cheater.
|
| Then the spyware will have to do a cryptographic verification
| of the keyboard ("Students are required to purchase a TI-498
| keyboard. $150 at the bookstore") to prevent the dongles.
| There will be a black market in mod chips for the TI-498 that
| allow external input into the traces on the keyboard
| backplane. TI will release a better model that is full of
| epoxy and a 5G connection that reports tampering...
|
| ... Yeah, I also predict more in-person learning :)
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Sure, but all of the above regarding making input look
| human is trivially easy -- because, again, AI.
|
| More stringent hardware based input systems are likely non-
| starters due to ADA requirements. For example, disabled
| students have their own input systems and a college will
| have to allow them reasonable accommodations. Then there's
| the technical challenges. Some authoritarian minded schools
| might try this route, but I hope saner heads will prevail
| and they'll be able to re-evaluate why take-home work
| exists in the first place, and whether it's actually a
| problem for students to use AI to augment their education.
| Perhaps it isn't!
| kuratkull wrote:
| I'd build a structure/robot that I'd attach to my keyboard,
| and it would press the keys.
|
| I started to write how it would be possible to control for
| that, but it got too Orwellian/horrible and I stopped.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| > I predict more in-person learning interactions.
|
| Which would be a huge benefit for the overall quality of
| education. A lot of student can write a passable essay in a
| word processor with spell check and tutors... but those same
| students sometimes have absolutely no idea what they've
| written. Group assignments has taught me this many times
| over.
| dv_dt wrote:
| As a parent whose student has worked with multiple essay entry
| editors/forms, they're almost all terrible with most students
| having to revert to writing the essay outside the system or
| risk losing their work multiple times. And this was with a
| simple editor - not more complex connections to even more
| sophisticated systems.
|
| The budget available for educational technology is not
| sufficient to maintain the operation of the software, let alone
| sufficient to pay technical staff adequate to assess and select
| reliable systems.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Yeah, then you get a bunch of non-cheating students who are
| intelligent and just annoyed with the text editor will use
| cheating tools to insert their essay they wrote in a proper
| word processor - further poisoning the dataset.
| jsf01 wrote:
| Open chat gpt on your phone, ask it to write your essay, then
| retype its response manually
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| You might even learn and retain the material better that way
| (assuming the gist of it was correct, that is).
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Proctoring software of this sort are already in use by large
| test-taking agencies such as PSI and Pearson-Vue. Microsoft
| also has its Take a test app.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Or they could move to a more British style, with in-person
| essays, proctored by human observers (not that there aren't
| old-fashioned ways to cheat on those too, but they're well-
| known).
| greiskul wrote:
| Yes, when I had to take university entry exams in Brazil, all
| parts of the exam were in person, including writing the
| essay, with a mandatory topic only disclosed when the exam
| starts. Preventing ai cheating might become more difficult
| for educational projects that are long form, like writing a
| dissertation, or big coding challenges. Although, for coding,
| one thing that I have consistenly seen work, is to just ask
| students to do a walk through of the code. People that just
| copy someone elses work are generally lazy, and don't really
| study what they copied, and it becomes easy to see who put in
| the work.
| staunton wrote:
| Writing a dissertation is a completely different kind of
| thing to graded homework assignments. A dissertation isn't
| graded, or even if it is, noone cares about the grade.
|
| The work in writing a good dissertation is done prior to
| writing, the writing is just wrapping up. If you can write
| a good dissertation with AI, so much for the better.
|
| Meanwhile, the work in writing a bad dissertation is never
| done at all and the dissertation is a more-or-less-
| undedectably plagiarized document read by at most two
| people (and perhaps noone, including the writer). This
| process is a waste of time and accelerating it with AI will
| change nothing other than saving a few hours for people who
| wanted a degree (and definitely would have gotten it
| without AI) without doing any research.
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| When I was in college we had a number of group projects and I
| thought the whole time that it would make a ton of sense for
| the professor to set up a class repo (I'm a old person so they
| would be a CVS repo at the time) and be able to see exactly
| what each person had contributed to the project. Even for
| single person projects it would have made it so much easier to
| detect cheaters. I also think it might light a fire under some
| of the less shameless slackers.
|
| I hope schools do this now. Not only for detecting cheaters but
| to get the kids used to working in a more real world
| environment.
| numbsafari wrote:
| What % of the grade should be based on LOC and what % based
| on story points?
| jandrese wrote:
| Typically I'd expect the group project to be graded on its
| own and all students get the same grade from the project.
| However, when a project shows that some of the participants
| committed zero lines of code or suddenly dropped in
| enormous blocks then they should be asked about it. At the
| very least they should be encouraged to use branches and
| make frequent commits like in the real world.
| valine wrote:
| I think you overestimate the competence of the majority of
| professors. They can't require version control if they don't
| understand what it is or how to use it.
| jandrese wrote:
| Back in the 90s I could kind of see this angle, but today
| it's so easy to set up a Gitlab there is no excuse.
| valine wrote:
| The problem isn't the accessibility of Git. I agree that
| it's easy enough to set up a Github account today.
|
| I've been somewhat of a Git evangelist. I've tried and
| failed countless times to convince people of the utility
| of version control. Perhaps I'm just a poor teacher, but
| in my experience, the features that make version control
| useful are too esoteric for most people to grasp.
|
| This may come off as arrogant and jaded, but I would
| speculate that at least 50% of the population is
| incapable of learning Git without extensive coaching.
| That's not to say it couldn't be useful for most people;
| it's just that they can't envision Git's utility for
| themselves.
|
| Utilizing version control to combat AI generated papers
| would require students and teachers have a deep enough
| understand of git to break their work up into small
| commits and branches. I don't see that happening outside
| of the CS departments of big 10 schools.
| bsder wrote:
| > I've tried and failed countless times to convince
| people of the utility of version control.
|
| Don't pitch it as version control. Pitch it as "homework
| submission process" that has the side benefit of being a
| backup if their laptop crashes. Students are used to
| horrible homework submission processes (looking at you
| Blackboard) and quickly adapt to seeing version control
| systems as a pretty nice alternative.
|
| And, for about 25% of your class, the lightbulb will go
| on and they'll start using version control even in their
| other courses.
|
| > at least 50% of the population is incapable of learning
| Git without extensive coaching
|
| Mercurial can be taught to mere mortals just fine. Same
| with Subversion. Same with CVS. I've done that for all
| three. People tell me that lots of artists use Perforce
| quite readily.
|
| Git is the only dumbass version control system that
| revels in being obtuse.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I've tried and failed countless times to convince
| people of the utility of version control.
|
| Are you conflating version control (the topic) with git
| (a specific implementation)?
|
| In my experience, it's really easy to clue people in to
| the value of version control.
|
| Git specifically, though, is genuinely difficult to learn
| and understand.
| 88913527 wrote:
| The cat and mouse iteration will be using ChatGPT integrated
| with Webdriver to slowly type the essay, writing a prompt that
| says "make occasional mistakes", etc.
| adoxyz wrote:
| But then you can have ChatGPT write your essay on a
| phone/tablet and you just slowly re-write it.
|
| I think schools will need to change the way they go about
| testing student understanding of topics. Personally I'm excited
| for what this might look like and it is a great opportunity for
| hackers to really innovate the educational field.
| tejtm wrote:
| Yet another arms race. Use this key logging training dataset to
| generate a simulated realtime response on the usb port.
| scythe wrote:
| LLMs are useful for a variety of things. What you're
| describing would only be useful for students cheating on
| assignments. I doubt that it will attract the many millions
| of dollars spent on training GPT-4.
|
| But more importantly, LLMs are always available over the
| Internet. If students need to use a physical device to cheat,
| that's already a big step forward, since it increases the
| chance of detection -- a key factor in deterring misbehavior.
| krunck wrote:
| I also had a similar idea on how to determine that a piece of
| writing is genuine. It would be to make students use a word
| processor that contains a full audit trail of all changes,
| timestamped. The software would then use a trained AI to look
| for patterns that deviate from normal composition activities.
| This could catch a lot of the current fraud. Until someone
| creates AI bots to get around it...
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Wouldn't it still be easier to type out the entire AI generated
| assignment than to come up with an assignment and then type out
| the assignment you came up with yourself?
| gridspy wrote:
| Obviously typing from start to finish with few edits is also
| a "failed" result in such a program. Someone actually writing
| an essay should be creating structure, taking notes,
| rearranging paragraphs etc.
|
| Then again you have a good point. Often you blat out an essay
| and then edit it. Same thing goes with typing in an AI
| generated template.
| busyant wrote:
| > Obviously typing from start to finish with few edits is
| also a "failed" result in such a program.
|
| I hear ya, but I wonder if there are people who have the
| proper mental organization to write a well-organized
| coherent essay in one shot.
|
| I'm not one of those people, but I assume they exist. And I
| assume they would be unfairly penalized with such a system.
|
| That being said, I think we are going to end up in a world
| where we are all communicating with each other _via_
| ChatGPT (or whatever succeeds it).
|
| ChatGPT will be our "Lingua Franca" as well as our "Mens
| communis" (I got that by asking ChatGPT). Strange times ...
|
| * edits for clarity: ha! </irony>
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I don't know if this is the way things _should_ go, but it
| seems like a decent prediction about how they probably will. In
| fact, many law school exams are already administered using
| "blue book" software that functions as rudimentary word
| processors that lock down the computer's other functions for
| the duration of the exam. Perhaps other disciplines use this
| software too.
|
| In the exam context, this software probably already solves the
| AI problem. Locking down the computer would not, of course, be
| a solution for other kinds of assignments, but I'll bet it
| won't be long until schools are using software like you
| described that are just do a lot of snooping instead of locking
| down the computer.
|
| Unfortunately, the existing software is very clunky and not
| very reliable. And it doesn't seem like anybody has a strong
| incentive to improve it. (The schools license the software, and
| the schools understandably don't care all that much whether the
| software is nice to use.)
| welshwelsh wrote:
| This seems so backwards to me.
|
| If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI
| generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be
| detected, then why are we still making students learn such an
| obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using
| technology?
|
| Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even
| with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools,
| and then raise the bar. For example, ask your art students to
| make complex compositions or animations that can't be handled
| by Midjourney without significant effort.
| nemo wrote:
| >why are we still making students learn such an obviously
| obsolete skill?
|
| Just because a machine can generate an essay of questionable
| quality with a fair chance of containing hallucinations
| making it unusable for many fields of human endeavor doesn't
| mean that writing is no longer a useful pedagogical tool.
| Learning to write is a part of learning to think.
| staunton wrote:
| The reason it's done is to teach students how to think. By
| writing down their thoughts they are forced to think about a
| topic. It's the same reason small children are still taught
| arithmetic although we have calculators.
|
| That's the theory, anyway. In practice students learn that
| "really thinking for themselves" in essays is usually not
| rewarded while paraphrasing some reading assignments with
| some sprinkled quotations works much better and is less work
| than thinking about topics they don't care about.
|
| Maybe the AI stuff will lead to practice better approximating
| the theoretical goal.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Context for the website creation:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13hi5y6/i_fed_gptz...
| thih9 wrote:
| > Web server is down Error code 521
|
| I'm seeing an error message from cloudflare.
|
| Is the website working for anyone else? Is there an archive /
| mirror?
| ehsankia wrote:
| Looks like it is indeed down.
| tikkun wrote:
| This is a great idea. Huge problem. Most of these AI detectors
| have poor accuracy, but it seems like education institutions
| treat them as truth.
| morkalork wrote:
| How many essays are written and graded every year? Even with a
| 0.0001% FPR, how many students would be facing the severe
| punishments for plagiarism like auto-failing a course or even
| expulsion? Ironically enough, using AI to make such decisions
| seems like one of those unethical use cases.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Teachers need to ask students to write things that are hard for
| AI to cheat on: if a bunch of humans end up writing very similar
| essays to the prompt - that's a prompt problem!
| krossitalk wrote:
| Ironic that I had to pass Cloudflare "Are you human"
| verification.
| nixcraft wrote:
| Yes, that is true. ChatGPT refuses to work with VPN and
| regularly checks for your IP using Cloudflare. Most of these
| new AI-driven startups are using Cloudflare. It is funny that
| startups collect/scrap data from all over the web but don't
| want to scrap their chatbot response without paid API. I guess
| it is life...
| jszymborski wrote:
| I literally close the tab when that happens.
| [deleted]
| andai wrote:
| I had to prove I wasn't AI to load the page.
| dbrereton wrote:
| Seems like the site might have crashed, here's an archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230515030802/https://itwasntai....
|
| But tl;dr many students have been accused of using AI by teachers
| who think that AI detection software works, when it really
| doesn't. So the goal of this site is to communicate to teachers
| that AI detection software isn't reliable.
|
| I originally discovered this in a reddit comment which you can
| see here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13hi5y6/comment/jk...
| kunley wrote:
| Interesting why this site is down...
| zzzeek wrote:
| With the advent of new technology, so must entire practices and
| industries spring up to counteract the inherent harm this
| technology will cause and is already causing.
|
| is it a given that technological progress will often necessitate
| societal harm? Is such technological progress actually progress
| for humanity?
|
| there seems to be this universal notion that "things that can be
| built will be built and are inevitable". It is for example
| argument #1 anytime anyone suggests we should be manufacturing
| and selling fewer guns - that this is not possible, since guns
| are "inevitable". You can 3-d print them after all! Therefore,
| everyone must be armed and we must live in an armed society with
| regular mass shootings, because what can we do? It's also a
| ubiquitous slogan used around AI - that AI is "inevitable". It's
| already out there, Google internal docs are betting that OSS AI
| will become the norm, and that's that. AI will be everywhere used
| for everything, making it's fairly unreliable decisions about
| things like who broke into your house last night, who's likely to
| be shoplifting, is that a bike in the crosswalk or just nothing
| at all, etc., and that's now the world we live in.
|
| Are humans as a species perhaps in need of better ways to _not_
| build things, since right now every possible thing that is
| imagined and becomes possible therefore "must" be built, en
| masse, and humanity's occupation becomes mitigating the species
| against all the harms brought about by all this "progress".
|
| anyway that's the low blood sugar version. I'll likely have not
| much to say after lunch
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Hey, I was just this idea the other day. One can imagine a
| world in which all new tech has to go through a period of
| deliberation before it ever sees the light of day.
|
| There would clearly be a lot of things that would be blocked.
| Some of them would be good. Even today, we have problems like
| new drugs being rejected due to risks, when people are dying
| due to lack of treatment. That kind of thing might get worse.
|
| On the other hand, we might have stopped Thimerosal, leaded
| gasoline, social media addiction, high fructose corn syrup,
| CFCs, and perhaps been a lot more careful about fossil fuels
| before they did so much damage. There are probably more
| technologies I haven't thought of -- it's easy to forget the
| ones we don't use anymore.
|
| I don't know if it would be a good thing on average. Delaying
| technology has costs. _BUT_ , when it comes to technologies
| that carry existential risk, like fossil fuels (I believe) AGI,
| I think it's likely worth it. Gotta play it safe sometimes, so
| you can keep playing.
| kunley wrote:
| Very well put.
|
| Why not to build nukes massively? Nukes are inevitable, because
| in the human nature there is inherent hunger for power (ask any
| psychologist nearby), and nukes are the ultimate power. With
| nukes at reasonable prices for wealthy families, the notion of
| an "atomic family" would really get a new exciting meaning!
|
| I am ofc sarcastic, but the reasoning is IMO the same like with
| the AI.. The real question here is: why to refrain from
| building nukes and why to refrain from uncontrollably
| developing AI.
| jfghi wrote:
| Ironically, the best detector for plagiarism would be a 15 minute
| conversation asking the student about their research and opinions
| on the topics written, kind of like interviewing someone who
| claims redis expertise on their resume.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| This is essentially the Oxbridge tutorial system where you have
| an hour(ish) meeting once(ish) a week with one or two other
| students and your tutor and talk over what you've learned, are
| set an assignment or three and have to answer any questions
| about the last week's assignments. A slightly more scalable
| version is the seminar system where you have up to 10 students
| and a tutor and you do roughly the same thing. It only works if
| participation is mandatory, missing seminars / tutorials is
| penalised and tutors are given leeway to adjust grades based on
| semina performance or flag students who do really well on their
| essays but appear incapable of explaining or defending what
| they've written.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This seems kind of pointless to me. Long before I entered the
| academic system, Turnitin had pioneered the industry of accusing
| students of plagiarism while simultaneously claiming unlimited
| license to their works.
|
| They also built a parallel industry selling to services to
| students on how to avoid being considered as plagiarism.
|
| In the real world, that is known as organized. But in academia,
| it is business as usual.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| It's not just university students anymore. My 11yo kid got
| accused of being a robot on a physics competition where the only
| reward is a (paid) summer camp full of extra physics lessons. All
| that was needed to trigger the accusation was a bit less fluent
| explanation of the solution, something you would expect from a
| student struggling with a difficult task. People are growing
| unreasonably paranoid.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| "AI Detectors" are the new anti-virus - useless but once required
| by bureaucratic policy both unstoppable and profitable.
| simonw wrote:
| On the one hand, this is sorely needed: AI detection software
| will inevitably be mostly snake oil.
|
| Academia and education desperately wants this software to work!
| As a result, selling them something that doesn't work is going to
| be very profitable.
|
| The most obvious problem with this class of software is how easy
| it would be to defeat if the students could access it themselves:
| generate some text, run it through the detector, then fiddle with
| it (by manually tweaking it or by prompting the AI to "reword
| this to be less perfect") until it passes.
|
| Which means these tools need to not be openly available... which
| makes them much harder to honestly test and evaluate, making it
| even easier to sell something that doesn't actually work.
|
| But... I don't think this site is particularly convincing right
| now. It has spelling mistakes (which at least help demonstrate AI
| probably didn't write it) and the key "How AI Detection Software
| Works" page has a "Coming Soon" notice.
|
| The "examples" page is pretty unconvincing right now too - and
| that's the page I expect to get the most attention:
| https://itwasntai.com/examples
|
| It looks to me like this is still very much under development,
| and is not yet ready for wider distribution.
| swyx wrote:
| this is exactly why i was stunned that someone apparently gave
| 3m to GPT-zero despite all its known flaws
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2023/05/09/wit...
|
| its too easy to be negative about things in hype cycles and
| retroactively look back and go "see! i was right! this was a
| terrible idea!" but.. this is a terrible idea
|
| to ai detection fans: show us on an information theory basis
| how you will smuggle in enough bits, avoiding user obfuscation,
| please. i will change my mind and support you the moment you
| prove this can be done, otherwise i am default extremely
| skeptical
| paulddraper wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/
| rorroe53 wrote:
| But why should educational instutions care? Education is a
| business, students are the customers (or in countries with
| state-funded education, the government). If AI helps people
| graduate faster, that's more money to the institutions, less
| effort to the students, and nice statistics for the
| governments.
|
| At least in my country most degrees aren't worth much anyway,
| they just open you doors to internships where you really learn
| stuff. AI isn't going to make the situation any worse.
| chongli wrote:
| Because educational institutions aren't in the business of
| selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously,
| walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit
| down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check
| ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time
| they'll give you access to the course materials online at
| well.
|
| What students are paying for is accreditation. It's not just
| their name that goes on the piece of paper, it's the school's
| name. Cheating undermines that business entirely. If a school
| looks the other way long enough there will be cheating
| scandals in the news and the school's reputation will be
| damaged.
| jkaptur wrote:
| True most of the time, but interestingly enough, this is
| not the case in China (even pre-COVID). The Tsinghua
| University gate had serious guards - you absolutely could
| not proceed onto campus without the proper authorization.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Because educational institutions aren't in the business
| of selling education: they give that away for free.
| Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a
| lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop
| you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the
| professor and 99% of the time they'll give you access to
| the course materials online at well._
|
| Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a
| professor at _Caltech_ even sponsored me as a visiting
| faculty member so I could check out books from the
| university libraries. No one in the administration even
| blinked an eye.
|
| I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like
| Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal
| systems group project with several other graduate students
| who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry
| the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.
|
| [1] https://www.pellegrino.caltech.edu/aarest1
| jacurtis wrote:
| When I was in college, I was dating a girl who was taking
| a philosophy class that was particularly interesting to
| me. One day we were hanging out before her class and she
| was telling me about their discussions, and it covered
| some ideas I really enjoyed discussing. Since I was in
| computer science, I never got the opportunity to take a
| lot of humanities like Philosophy and so I mentioned that
| I wished I could take this class. She had to go to class
| and just said "you can come with me if you want".
|
| I went with her and just sat down. I took notes, I
| participated in discussion, and ended up going back for
| several weeks. I eventually stopped going as they moved
| onto another chapter. I popped back in a few weeks later
| and the only thing the teacher said when they saw me come
| into the lecture hall was "hey it's good to see you
| again". The prof knew I existed but either didn't realize
| or didn't care that I wasn't actually on the class roll.
| jasmer wrote:
| That's fine though, and it's exactly how we would want it
| to be aka it's for the students but if someone is ernest
| they can just 'participate' in some thing. That's a
| positive outcome I can't fathom getting upset by that.
|
| That said, showing up for a class isn't exactly 'an
| education' either.
| jamilton wrote:
| Governments paying for education don't just want graduations,
| they want an educated workforce, because there are benefits
| from having that.
|
| Instructors generally do not treat education like a business.
| On some level the institutions themselves often are business-
| like, but on the classroom level I don't think that's the
| case.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I'm an adjunct professor (I still work full-time in the
| engineering field, but teach part-time) and I can tell you
| that ~75% of the professors don't want to teach as much as
| they want to do research. Most of them are only in academia
| to do research, but they are required to teach a certain
| number of classes.
|
| At least at our University, it is mostly a thinktank. We
| publish research and attend symposiums for research and are
| mostly motivated by the research. The teaching is a
| byproduct.
|
| This is probably not the case at community colleges and
| smaller colleges that are mostly pumping out degrees. But
| large universities are mostly motivated by research and
| getting published. That is largely what motivates high
| quality professors to work there.
| simonw wrote:
| They care because this is massively disruptive to the way
| they teach at the moment. They have decades of practices in
| place for how they evaluate students which don't work if
| students can have AI do the work for them.
|
| They can chose to reinvent everything about how they operate,
| or they can pay money to a company that promises to make that
| problem go away for them.
|
| It's not surprising that many of them are trying the latter
| option first.
| visarga wrote:
| People getting into AI today follow courses like:
|
| LLM University - https://docs.cohere.com/docs/llmu
|
| and never get to learn about linear regression, bias and
| variance, cost function and gradient descent, regularisation
| and optimisation - all the good things taught by Andrew Ng in
| the amazing course he run 12 years ago just before creating
| Coursera.
|
| Is that a good thing?
| simonw wrote:
| Learning about those things isn't particularly relevant to
| learning how to use LLMs for NLP tasks.
|
| Not saying they're not worth learning, but I think it's
| reasonable for them not to be included in the syllabus for
| that particular course.
|
| Kind of like how learning memory management in C doesn't
| need to be a pre-requisite for a course on Python.
|
| Note that learning about those things will likely make you
| a better LLM+NLP practitioner, in the same way that having
| a good grasp of memory management in C will help you be
| more effective at working with Python - but it's OK to
| leave them out of introductory courses.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think people getting into AI today instead ask ChatGPT
| and similar models questions like:
|
| > "What field of modern science relies heavily on "linear
| regression, bias and variance, cost function and gradient
| descent, regularisation and optimisation"?"
|
| To dive into a particular topic:
|
| > "Provide a course outline for a four week course, meeting
| twice a week, that focuses on linear regression in the
| context of machine learning and the relationship between
| inputs and outputs."
|
| And to get to the actual material, zoom in some more:
|
| > "Please expand Session 2: Simple Linear regression into
| an hour-long talk focused on Python coding approaches to
| the problem"
|
| And again, to get some working code:
|
| > "For topic #2, please provide an explicit code example of
| using numpy, pandas and scikit-learn to load a dataset,
| preprocess the data, and split it into training and testing
| sets"
|
| Anyone can generate a course on any topic using this
| approach, with pretty good results.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Believe it or not, a lot of educational institutions really
| do care about actually educating their students and not just
| being diploma mills.
| jacurtis wrote:
| The fact that every job on the planet requires a bachelors
| degree now has done a real dis-service to the entire
| education system. It spawned a whole host of new
| institutions that only want to pump out degrees that cross
| the absolute minimum threshold for accreditation.
|
| The consequence of these diploma mills are that they are
| now competitors to normal universities and have caused
| other universities to dilute their requirements and courses
| in order to compete against the diploma mills. In the end,
| we have regressed to the lowest common denominator, making
| the Bachelor Degree barely more respected than a high
| school diploma.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > AI detection software will inevitably be mostly snake oil.
|
| Probably so. The problem, of course, is that the inability to
| detect AI authorship leads to the increase of general distrust
| of everything in society.
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| > It has spelling mistakes (which at least help demonstrate AI
| probably didn't write it)
|
| Nowadays if you want to be convincing you got to maek some
| spelling misakes. Something that looks like predictive keyboard
| errors, or typing errors.
| shortj wrote:
| Funny enough, one fo the first things I did with ChatGPT was
| teach it how to write with charcater keyboard transpositions
| and subtle typos so people wouldn't think varioius text was
| AI generated. Works pretty well.
|
| (Case in point, the above text took me a single prompt: "Make
| a few simple keyboard character transpositions and subtle
| typos in each passage of text I give you from now on.")
| wizofaus wrote:
| Still, I doubt an LLM would ever start a sentence with
| "Funny enough" (the normal usage is "Funnily enough" but
| even that doesn't seem like something the current crop of
| AIs would use without explicit prompting).
| shortj wrote:
| Nice catch and very good point. The model actually tried
| to fix this in a couple cases, but not all, when I was
| playing with it to see how else it would typo.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Any sufficiently good AI detector will soon become part of the
| training process.
| jandrese wrote:
| I am concerned about the false positive rate on AI detectors.
| But if they are being used to flag submissions for further
| review only then I can go with it. Finding out if a student
| cheated shouldn't be too hard, just quiz them on what they
| wrote.
| notahacker wrote:
| And even before quizzing them, their work can be cross
| referenced against their other writing. If they've gone from
| writing with poor understanding of subject matter basics and
| poor written English to something like an exemplar essay in a
| matter of weeks, it's pretty clearly they've had _some_ sort
| of help whether that 's AI or not.
| danenania wrote:
| That's true, but it's also straightforward to train detectors
| with massive quantities of human and AI-generated text. So AIs
| can be trained by the latest detectors, but detectors can also
| trained by the latest AIs. It will probably come down to which
| side has more resources to devote to training.
| dahwolf wrote:
| To prove authenticity, be politically incorrect in a way AI never
| would. You'll be dismissed, canceled and fired, but at least
| authentically so.
| zirgs wrote:
| I tried running gpt4chan locally. It's pretty good at
| generating politically incorrect, racist, misogynist and
| antisemitic stuff.
| richbell wrote:
| CAPTCHA v11:
|
| > What was the name of H.P. Lovecraft's cat?
| refulgentis wrote:
| What is up with these snowflake neues, posting bitter over-the-
| top political comments?
|
| They stick out like a sore thumb in spring 2023.
|
| It flew under the radar more when everyone was short-tempered,
| say winter 2021.
|
| The people who are still stuck on it and in their own heads
| seem to have a __negative__ herding effect. There's a seed of
| irrationality that drives some, and as there's fewer, they
| stick out more, making it more grating and driving more people
| away.
| dahwolf wrote:
| What's up with catastrophizing an obvious joke?
|
| See, if you'd intellectually engage in good faith, you'd
| understand the point that one of few (if not the only)
| reliable ways to tell apart AI from humans in the future
| would be human shortcomings.
|
| A misguided offense extrapolated into pseudo-intellectual
| tone policing is a beautiful example of that, so you pass.
| Balgair wrote:
| I love this AI cheating detection stuff.
|
| Mostly because it really gets at the root of the issues in
| education.
|
| Like, fine, you have made some system where cheating is
| impossible. Great.
|
| But have your students learned anything?
|
| If educators put in even a iota of effort into learning their
| students, then they know who is cheating and who isn't.
|
| But if they put that same amount back into teaching, then
| everyone wins.
|
| Education is not a contest with winner and losers.
|
| (Yes, ok, you went to a bad school where it was a contest for
| your pre-med degree. Look where that has gotten US healthcare.)
| benhoyt wrote:
| I've been reviewing answers to questionnaires we send out to
| potential software engineering candidates. Sometimes candidates
| seem to write 90% of the submission themselves, and then use
| ChatGPT for the last couple of questions (which are more general,
| like "Outline your thoughts on documentation in software
| projects"). I joked to a colleague that I'd come up with a fool-
| proof ChatGPT detector in one line of Python:
| is_chatgpt = paragraphs[-1].startswith(('In conclusion',
| 'Finally'))
| kuratkull wrote:
| Don't forget "Overall, "
| yieldcrv wrote:
| oooh I like that, the student can sue for copyright infringement
| because the teacher uploaded their work and proved that they
| uploaded it?
|
| sounds like a simple sublicensing clause imposed on the student
| will fix that, but the next few semesters a few examples can be
| made of the teachers and institutions
|
| will pay off that tuition
| petesergeant wrote:
| Probably not; schools have been using Turnitin for a while, and
| presumably had students sign waivers
| Animats wrote:
| That's was litigated years ago, for TurnItIn.[1] Uploading
| student papers for plagiarism checking purposes was considered
| fair use by a US federal court.
|
| [1] https://macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/judge-rules-
| anti...
| moffkalast wrote:
| Has anyone tried using an LLM as an LLM detector yet?
| minimaxir wrote:
| That is the implementation that many of these approaches are
| doing.
|
| It is a very, very hard problem.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| It is an impossible problem. An llm can produce any
| combination of words. A human can produce any combination of
| words.
| flatiron wrote:
| It works...ish. GPT4 is pretty good at detecting what it wrote
| but I was able to get a false positive with the United States
| constitution. Or maybe we can go deeper and say maybe it was AI
| generated?
| jandrese wrote:
| So if you submitted the US Constitution word for word for
| your assignment you wouldn't expect the cheating detector to
| flag it? How isn't this flagrant plagiarism?
| function_seven wrote:
| I would expect a plagiarism detector to flag it. I would
| not expect an "AI wrote this" to flag it, because it was
| not written by AI.
| jandrese wrote:
| An AI detector is basically a plagiarism detector trained
| on AI datasets. Fundamentally it's about discovering
| writing that is too similar to existing writing, which is
| why I'm concerned about false positives.
| function_seven wrote:
| Yeah, which is why "AI detection" is crap. It's basically
| the plagiarism detector with the false-positive dampening
| turned off. (I know, I know, it may not be exactly that
| under the hood, but I think that's what it amounts to in
| practice).
|
| I think you and I agree. I'm just saying that the "AI
| wrote this" flag on something that's notoriously _not_
| AI-written should be enough to reject outright the use of
| these detectors.
|
| Like a mechanic who warns me that my Tesla doesn't have a
| muffler. They're technically correct, but I wouldn't
| trust them to diagnose anything in the future.
| btilly wrote:
| My favorite example of it wasn't AI is that software to detect
| GPT flagged the US Constitution as almost certainly being AI.
|
| https://stealthoptional.com/news/us-constitution-flagged-as-...
|
| As long as that kind of egregious mistake is possible, we should
| look at such tools with suspicion.
| inconceivable wrote:
| this entire line of reasoning (using AI to detect AI, with
| disastrous results) is ripe for a giant lawsuit. a sufficiently
| wealthy school is bound to accuse a sufficiently wealthy student
| at some point.
| okdood64 wrote:
| If a professor fails you because they thought your final essay
| was written by an AI and it wasn't, do you have legal grounds to
| start a lawsuit against the school?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Certainly anyone can start a lawsuit. Maybe there's eventually
| a chance for some kind of class action prevail, but I don't see
| how an individual student could make a dent against the
| resources of a university.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is an "everything sucks all around situation" because since
| real things are tied to academic performance you have to weed out
| dishonesty for fairness but also the power disparity between
| student/teacher and the black box nature of the detection makes
| it impossible to actually prove your innocence.
|
| I wish more than anything that the availability of AI will at
| some point force schools to restructure how classes work to make
| cheating like this a non-issue. Higher education is actually
| unbelievably horrible at actually educating. I only realized that
| once I graduated and on a whim wanted to learn about something
| that requires university level expertise. If you're not there for
| the credential it's a monumental waste of time. If classes were
| designed for students who wanted to be there and the grades were
| _only_ for your benefit and not used as a target for anything you
| might actually have engaged learners.
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