Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

Easy to catch people that aren't trying in the slightest not to get caught, right? I could instead feed a corpus of my own writing to ChatGPT and ask it to write in my style.

I assume most people would make least amount of effort and simply prompt chat interface to produce some text, such text is rather detectable. I would like to see some experiments even for this type of detection though.

The point of these detectors is to spot stuff the students didn’t research and write themselves. But if the corpus is your own written material then you’ve already done the work yourself.

Student don't have to perform research or study for the given task, they need to acquire an example of text suitable for reproducing their style, text structure, to create an impression of being produced by hand, so the original task could be avoided. You have to have at least one corpus of your own work for this to work, or an adequate substitute. And you still could reject works by their content, but we are specifically talking about llm smell.

I was talking about the task of detecting llm generated text which is incredibly hard if any effort is made, while some people have an impression that it's trivially easy. It leads to unfair outcomes while giving false confidence to e.g. teachers that llms are adequately accounted for.

To get an LLM to generate content in your own writing, there’s going to be no substitute for training it on your own corpus. By which point you might as well do the work yourself.

The whole point cheating is to avoid doing the work. Building your own corpus requires doing that work.

You're saying it's not good enough at mimicking styles. others saying it's good enough. I think if it's not good enough today it'll be good enough tomorrow. Are you betting on it not becoming good enough?

Teachers will notice if students writing style shifts in one piece compared to another.

Nobody disputes that you can get LLMs to mimic other people. However it cannot mimic a specific style it hasn’t been trained on. And very few people who are going to cheat are going to take the time to train an LLM on their writing style since the entire point of plagiarism is to avoid doing work.

Imagine the teacher saying "this is not your style it's too good" to a student who legit tried killing any motivation to do anything but cheat for remaining life

If the student always uses LLMs then it would be pretty obvious by the fact that they’re failing at the cause in all bar the written assessments (ie the stuff they can cheat on).

> Also do you expect that student's style is fixed forever

Of course not. But people’s styles don’t change dramatically on one paper and reset back afterwards.

> teachers are all so invested that they can really tell when the student is trying something new vs use an LLM that was trained to output writing in the style of an average student?

Depends on the size of the classes. When I was at college I do know that teachers did check for changes in writing styles. I know this because one of the kids on my class was questioned about his changes in his writing style.

With time, I’m sure anti-cheat software will also check again previous works by the students to check for changes in style.

However this was never my point. My point was that cheaters wouldn’t bother training on their own corpus. You keep pushing the conversation away from that.

> Imagine the teacher saying "this is not your style it's too good" to a student who legit tried killing any motivation to do anything but cheat for remaining life

That’s how literally no good teacher would ever approach the subject. Instead they’d talk about how good the paper was and ask about where the inspiration came from.

There's nothing stopping students from generating an essay and going over it.

>Of course not. But people’s styles don’t change dramatically on one paper and reset back afterwards.

Takes just a little effort to avoid this.

>With time, I’m sure anti-cheat software will also check again previous works by the students to check for changes in style.

That's never going to happen. Probably because it doesn't make any sense. What's a change in writing style ? Who's measuring that ? And why is that an indicator of cheating ?

>However this was never my point. My point was that cheaters wouldn’t bother training on their own corpus. You keep pushing the conversation away from that.

Training is not necessary in any technical sense. A decent sample of your writing in the context is more than good enough. Probably most cheaters wouldn't bother but some certainly would.

This then comes back to my original point. If they learn the content and rewrite the output, is it really plagiarism?

> Takes just a little effort to avoid this.

That depends entirely on the size of the coursework.

> That's never going to happen. Probably because it doesn't make any sense. What's a change in writing style ? Who's measuring that ? And why is that an indicator of cheating ?

This entire article and all the conversations that followed are about using writing styles to spot plagiarism. It’s not a new concept nor a claim I made up.

So if you don’t agree with this premise then it’s a little late in the thread to be raising that disagreement.

> Training is not necessary in any technical sense. A decent sample of your writing in the context is more than good enough. Probably most cheaters wouldn't bother but some certainly would.

I think you’d need a larger corpus than the average cheater would be bothered to do. But I will admit I could be waaay off in my estimations of this.

Who said anything about rewriting? That's not necessary. You can have GPT write your essay and all you do is study it afterwards, maybe ask questions etc. You've saved hours of time and yes that would still be cheating and plagiarism by most.

>This entire article and all the conversations that followed are about using writing styles to spot plagiarism. It’s not a new concept nor a claim I made up.

>So if you don’t agree with this premise then it’s a little late in the thread to be raising that disagreement.

The article is about piping essays into black box neural networks that you can at best hypothesize is looking for similarities between the presented writing and some nebulous "AI" style. It's not comparing styles between your past works and telling you just cheated because of some deviation. That's never going to happen.

>I think you’d need a larger corpus than the average cheater would be bothered to do. But I will admit I could be waaay off in my estimations of this.

An essay or two in the context window is fine. I think you underestimate just what SOTA LLMs are capable of.

You don't even need to bother with any of that if all you want is a consistent style. A style prompt with a few instructions to deviate from GPT's default writing style is sufficient.

My point is that it's not this huge effort to have generated writing that doesn't yo-yo in writing style between essays.

Maybe. But I think we are getting too deep into hypotheticals about stuff that wasn’t even related to my original point.

> The article is about piping essays into black box neural networks that you can at best hypothesize is looking for similarities between the presented writing and some nebulous "AI" style. It's not comparing styles between your past works and telling you just cheated because of some deviation. That's never going to happen.

You cannot postulate your own hypothetical scenarios and deny other people the same privilege. That’s just not an honest way to debate.

> My point is that it's not this huge effort to have generated writing that doesn't yo-yo in writing style between essays.

I get your point. It’s just your point requires a bunch of assumptions and hypotheticals to work.

In theory you’re right. But, and at risk of continually harping on about my original point, I think the effort involved in doing it well would be beyond the effort required for the average person looking to cheat.

And that’s the real crux of it. Not whether something can be done, because hypothetically speaking anything is possible in AI with sufficient time, money and effort. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen.

But since this entire argument is a hypothetical, it’s probably better we agree to disagree.