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427 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.224s | source
1. bane ◴[] No.41908436[source]
I think the only way around this problem is one we can borrow from the demoscene art competitions: show your work.

In the demoscene, still graphics competitions, at least as far as I remember, most organizers defend against cheating by requiring the artists to capture snapshots of their work over time to show that they didn't:

1) steal other people's graphics

2) just use some kind of tool to convert a photo or rework somebody else's work

During the presentation of the works for voting, all of the stages are typically displayed for the crowd.

This works today because AI tools typically don't output any intermediate steps, and if they do they don't look anything like what a human would produce.

This works for most educational assignments as well.

Heck, in fields where Microsoft Word is an option, Sharepoint preserves the change history and it's a pretty simply matter to just review that history to show progression, edits over time, and all the other elements you might think of to show that the student actually wrote the document themselves. It also helps frustrate people who might just copy-paste dump other work into the document. The teacher doesn't need to review or grade ever single revision, just have it all accessible.

Two other practical examples of where this has worked:

1) In university all of my mathematics professors required us to "show our work", which helped with partial credit in cases we arrived at the wrong answer, but also defeated the use of advanced symbolic systems that simply barfed out the answer.

2) At work I had an issue with an employee who I suspected was claiming other people's work. He had a role that was supposed to be reviewing and editing their documents so it was difficult to prove. However, a review of Sharepoint's edit history for multiple documents showed no edits made by him on several major documents. This sparked an inquiry to ensure he wasn't using some alternative method, and the rest of was simple to deal with HR.