Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

One of my kid's teachers sent out a warning to students that all essays would be checked with AI detection software and the repercussions one would face if caught. A classmate did an AI check on the teacher's warning and it came back positive for having been AI-generated.

The default tone of ChatGPT and the default tone of school or academic writing (at all levels) are not exactly the same, but in the grand vector space of such things, they are awfully close to each other. And all the LLMs have presumably already been fed with an awful lot of this sort writing, too. It's not a surprise that a by-the-numbers report, either in high school or college, of the sort that generally ought to get a good grade because it is exactly what is being asked for, comes out with a high probability of having been generated by GPT-style technology. And I'm sure LLMs have been fed with a lot of syllabuses and other default teacher writing documents, and almost any short teacher-parent or teacher-student communication is not going to escape from same basin of writing attraction that the LLMs write in very easily.

While I understand the spirit of your message, you should not care about that.

"One of my kid's teachers set out a warning to students that all essays would be checked against the other students' essays to see if they are the same and the repercussions one would face if caught. A classmate did a Google search and found the questions of the essay as examples on a book."

One thing is perfectly valid, the other one is not.

Then of course, there are shades of gray. Using ChatGPT for some things is not copying and you can even say the kids are learning to use the tool, but if you use it for 95% of the essay, it is.

Hah, that’s great! Hopefully this dramatic chapter in history is a short one, and we learn to adapt away from graded homework. A 4% false positive rate is insane when that could mean failure and/or expulsion, and even more so when any serious cheater can get around in two minutes with a “write in the style of…” preprompt.

Hmm I think you may have misinterpreted. The accusation isn’t that the teacher used AI, the accusation is that these tools are unreliable

Then I completely agree hahaha

> Hopefully this dramatic chapter in history is a short one

Doubtful. This is a new sector/era in the cat-v-mouse game.

> we learn to adapt away from graded homework.

Nothing proposed as an alternative scales well and - ironically - it's likely that something _like_ an LLM will be used to evaluate pupil quality / progress over time.

You've omitted the most important part - what happened after? Had the reason prevailed? ;-)

I'm asking, because all this "AI" text-generation stuff isn't a technology problem. It's 101% a human problem.

I understand your point, but I would say that it is not particularly appropriate for a teacher to use AI (or plagiarize, to an extent) in this context. Taking questions from an existing bank, in my opinion, is different to AI generating your prompt/email/etc. What I mean is, students will NOT listen even more so if they find out how blatantly hypocritical a teacher is being (in the hypothetical situation that the teacher really did use AI)

This isn't a made up situation. Teachers at my school have used AI for essay prompts, test questions, etc and it spreads around and generally leads to the sentiment that "if the teacher is doing it, they can't in good faith tell me to not". Imagine if in math class the teacher , after just telling the students they can't use a calculator, types in a simple arithmetic expression into their calculator.

> grand vector space

what.

In the language of "embeddings" of machine learning.