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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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427 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.225s | source
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greatartiste ◴[21 Oct 24 06:46 UTC] No.41901335[source]▶
For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you realise that the adage that this is just autocomplete on steroids is true.

However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.

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JoshTriplett ◴[21 Oct 24 08:54 UTC] No.41902038[source]▶
> also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity

So do humans. Many people have pet phrases or words that they use unusually often compared to others.

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1. pessimizer ◴[21 Oct 24 12:09 UTC] No.41903277[source]▶
People have their favorite phrases or words, but also as readers we fixate on words that we don't personally use, and project that onto the writer.

But as a second language learner, you notice that people get stuck on particular words during writing sessions. If I run into a very unusual (and unnecessary) word, I know they're going to use it again within a page or two, maybe once after that, then never again.

I blame it on the writer remembering a cool word, or finding a cool word in a thesaurus, then that word dropping out of their active vocabulary after they tried it out a couple times. There's probably an analogue in LLMs, if just because that makes unusual words more likely to repeat themselves in a particular passage.