There’s no way for teachers to figure out if students are using ChatGPT to cheat, OpenAI says in new back-to-school guide::AI detectors used by educators to detect use of ChatGPT don’t work, says OpenAI.
Education has a fundamental incentive problem. I want to embrace AI in my classroom. I’ve been studying ways of using AI for personalized education since I was in grade school. I wanted personalized education, the ability to learn off of any tangent I wanted, to have tools to help me discover what I don’t know so I could go learn it.
The problem is, I’m the minority. Many of my students don’t want to be there. They want a job in the field, but don’t want to do the work. Your required course isn’t important to them, because they aren’t instructional designers who recognize that this mandatory tangent is scaffolding the next four years of their degree. They have a scholarship, and can’t afford to fail your assignment to get feedback. They have too many courses, and have to budget which courses to ignore. The university holds a duty to validate that those passing the courses met a level of standards and can reproduce their knowledge outside of a classroom environment. They have a strict timeline - every year they don’t certify their knowledge to satisfaction is a year of tuition and random other fees to pay.
If students were going to university to learn, or going to highschool to learn, instead of being forced there by societal pressures - if they were allowed to learn at their own pace without fear of financial ruin - if they were allowed to explore the topics they love instead of the topics that are financially sound - then there would be no issue with any of these tools. But the truth is much bleaker.
Great students are using these tools in astounding ways to learn, to grow, to explore. Other students - not bad necessarily, but ones with pressures that make education motivated purely by extrinsic factors than intrinsic - have a perfect crutch available to accidentally bypass the necessary steps of learning. Because learning can be hard, and tedious, and expensive, and if you don’t love it, you’ll take the path of least resistance.
In game design, we talk about not giving the player the tools to optimize their fun away. I love the new wave of AI, I’ve been waiting for this level of natural language processing and generation capability for a very long time, but these are the tools for students to optimize the learning away. We need to reframe learning and education. We need to bring learning front and center instead of certification. Employers need to recognize this, universities need to recognize this, highschools and students and parents need to recognize this.
This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.
Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.
To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.
I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.
100%, and this is really my main point. Because it should be hard and tedious, a student who doesn’t really want to learn - or doesn’t have trust in their education - will bypass those tedious bits with the AI rather than going through those tedious, auxiliary skills that you’re expected to pick up, and use the AI was a personal tutor - not a replacement for those skills.
So often students are concerned about getting a final grade, a final result, and think that was the point, thus, “If ChatGPT can just give me the answer what was the point”, but no, there were a bunch of skills along the way that are part of the scaffolding and you’ve bypassed them through improper use of available tools. For example, in some of our programming classes we intentionally make you use worse tools early to provide a fundamental understanding of the evolution of the language ergonomics or to understand the underlying processes that power the more advanced, but easier to use, concepts. It helps you generalize later, so that you don’t just learn how to solve this problem in this programming language, but you learn how to solve the problem in a messy way that translates to many languages before you learn the powerful tools of this language. As a student, you may get upset you’re using something tedious or out of date, but as a mentor I know it’s a beneficial step in your learning career.
Maybe it would help to teach students about learning early, and how learning works.
The core issue here is we don’t know how to measure the skill of learning directly.
I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.
Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.
I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.
I agree mostly with your comment. Math class used to be called logic, because that’s really what the general population is there for. Math is a vehicle to learn logical thinking. Those who become engineers or physicists will then learn how to apply those logic skills in their chosen field.
I disagree that history classes were mainly there to analyze evidence to make a point. We learn history, so that we can better participate in discussions, know where we came from, and learn from past mistakes. It’s vital that voters have an understanding of history to prevent bad things from happening. Don’t get me wrong, the main point about history classes wasn’t learning exact dates, but to have a good understanding of the timeline and have a good grasp of major events in the country/world. It’s that part, learning details about major events that I’m concerned will be glossed over with AI coming into play. How can you recognize a destructive political trend if you never learned why it was destructive in the past?
I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.
What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.
But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.
Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.
Wow, that was a very distilled insight. I’m grateful in hindsight that I didn’t have the option of optimisong my learning away, because my younger self would have, and I’m better for having struggled through under my own steam. Your insight was interesting, thanks
I appreciate the comment, and it’s a point I’ll be making this year in my courses. More than ever, students have been struggling to motivate themselves to do the work. The world’s on fire and it’s hard to intrinsically motivate to do hard things for the sake of learning, I get it. Get a degree to get a job to survive, learning is secondary. But this survival mindset means that the easiest way is the best way, and it’s going to crumble long-term.
It’s like jumping into an MMORPG and using a bot to play the whole game. Sure you have a cap level character, but you have no idea how to play, how to build a character, and you don’t get any of the references anyone else is making.
If someone can use the tool to do the job successfully, I don’t see if that learning was actually necessary. Like I learned to use a phone rather than a telegraph. I learned how to drive a car rather than ride a horse. I learned a calculator rather than a sliderule.
Of course we’re still at the stage where you need to double check the tool,but that skill is maybe more like supervising someone rather than directly doing the task.
I can imagine prompt engineering will actually be a thing, and asking the AI to fix parts that don’t work is the short term. We already can ask the AI to look over it’s own work for mistakes, I have to imagine that’s going to be built in soon…
The worse thing is if the student can actually ootimize the learning away with the AI, so too can employers optimize away the potential employees.
This is a very output-driven perspective. Another comment put it well, but essentially when we set up our curriculum we aren’t just trying to get you to produce the one or two assignments that the AI could generate - we want you to go through the motions and internalize secondary skills. We’ve set up a four year curriculum for you, and the kinds of skills you need to practice evolve over that curriculum.
This is exactly the perspective I’m trying to get at work my comment - if you go to school to get a certification to get a job and don’t care at all about the learning, of course it’s nonsense to “waste your time” on an assignment that ChatGPT can generate for you. But if you’re there to learn and develop a mastery, the additional skills you would have picked up by doing the hard thing - and maybe having a Chat AI support you in a productive way - is really where the learning is.
If 5 year olds can generate a university level essay on the implications of thermodynamics on quantum processing using AI, that’s fun, but does the 5 year old even know if that’s a coherent thesis? Does it imply anything about their understanding of these fields? Are they able to connect this information to other places?
Learning is an intrinsic task that’s been turned into a commodity. Get a degree to show you can generate that thing your future boss wants you to generate. Knowing and understanding is secondary. This is the fear of generative AI - further losing sight that we learn though friction and the final output isn’t everything. Note that this is coming from a professor that wants to mostly do away with grades, but recognizes larger systemic changes need to happen.
I am very pro learning, but I also have basically seen that our society doesn’t value it. We’re anti expertise to our detriment. I like figuring things out and learning… But I am not sure that that’s any more than an opinion I hold. If the learning doesn’t help you in life, I have a hard time defending it as more than a preference.
I guess what I’m trying to say is - my values and motivations aren’t the only ones, and I can’t prove them as the right ones. If someone is primarily motivated by making money, learning is a little correlated with that, but it’s not overwhelmingly so. More specifically - writing ChatGPT style essays are something I believe plenty of people have lucrative careers without ever doing.
I not even convinced college has positive ROI anymore. In that context, the output is the issue. In the context of most jobs it is also the issue.
Maybe this analogy will help - do you feel that all the people taking better pictures than ever thanks to AI in their cellphone cameras and automatic post processing have missed an important skill of working out ISO, aperture and shutter speed? Do you think they would mostly agree those skills are useful? Are there a lot of jobs for “camera technicians” where the manual settings are what they’re hired for?
Now, I agree that in my analogy - if you know how the settings relate to freezing motion or background blur or whatever, you can take better pictures and likely have a higher hit rate. But I don’t think the world prioritizes that, and I am not sure in the bigger picture they are wrong.
My wife teaches at a university. The title is partly bullshit:
For most teachers it couldn’t be more obvious who used ChatGPT in an assignment and who didn’t.
The problem, in most instances, isn’t the “figuring out” part, but the “reasonably proving” part.
And that’s the most frustrating part: you know an assignment was AI-written, there are no tools to prove it and the university gives its staff virtually no guidance or assistance on the subject matter, so you’re almost powerless.
My coven-mate was called in by her college dean, accusing her of faking or plagiarizing her mid-term thesis. (I totally forget what the subject was. This was late 1980s. She wanted to work in national intelligence.)
But the thing is, she could expain every part of her rabbit-hole deep dive (which was a trip to several libraries and locating books themselves rather than tracking leads through the internet.) It was all fresh in her head, and to the shock and awe of her dean and instructor (delight? horror?) it was clear she was just a determined genius doing post-grad quality work because she pushed herself that hard. And yes, she was out of their league and could probably write the thesis again if that was necessary.
In our fucked up society, the US has little respect for teachers or even education so I don’t expect anything real to happen, but this would be grounds to reduce classroom size by increasing faculty size so that each teacher is familiar with their fifteen students, their capabilities and ambitions and challenges at home. That way when a kid turns in an AI essay but then can’t expain what the essay says, the teacher can use it as a teachable moment: point out that AI is a springboard, a place to start as a foundation for a report, but it’s still important for the student to make it their own, and make sure it comes to conclusions they agree with.
I would like to know how you know who’s using ChatGPT though. A gut feeling doesn’t work for many good reasons.
ChatGPT writes in very distinct style and it’s quite easy to tell by anyone who has played around with it. The issue here isn’t necessarily being able to tell whose cheating but proving it is the hard part.
Yeah, I use ChatGPT to assist with the grammar in my posts here at times. However, I need to explicitly instruct it to only correct the errors and not make any other changes. Otherwise, it completely rewrites the entire message, and the language ends up sounding unmistakably like ChatGPT. As you mentioned, it’s immediately apparent because it has a distinct style, and no typical human writes in that manner. Like you said, it’s easy to discern but challenging to confirm. Additionally, with the right prompt, you can probably get it to generate text that sounds more conventional.
Something that can come up is weird notation in math.
As an example photomath, which is an automatic math problem solver, uses a different interval notation (ie
x ≥ 2is solved for allx ∈ [ 2, ∞ ⟩), than the one used in my locale (iex ≥ 2is solved for allx ∈ [ 2, ∞ )or for allx ∈ ⟨ 2, ∞ )) which does trick some people up.This is more relevant at highschool level than academic level I’m guessing though.
extra note: chat GPT gets the right notation (in a sample rate of n=1).
Talk to them?
But professors are busy doing research. They don’t have time for that.
It makes some sense. If a tool could reliably discern it, the tool would used to train the model to be more indistinguishable from regular text, putting us back to where we are now.
This is literally how a GAN (generative adversarial network) works.
Not a classroom setting, but I recently needed to investigate a software engineer in my team that has allegedly been using ChatGPT to do their work. My company works with critical customer data, so we’re banned from using any generative AI tools.
It’s really easy to tell. The accused engineer cannot explain their own code, they’ve been seen using ChatGPT at work, and they’re stupid enough to submit code with wildly different styling when we dictate the use of a formatter to ensure our code style is consistent. It’s pretty cut and dry, IMO.
I imagine that teachers will also do the same thing. My wife is a teacher, and has asked me about AI tools in the past. Her school hasn’t had any issues, because it’s really obvious when ChatGPT has been used - similarly to how it’s obvious when someone ripped some shit off the internet and paraphrased some parts to get around web searches.
Rich kids were already cheating the system before chatgpt
Havent read the article yet but guess teacher’s best option is to go back to paper and do all of their work during class period. Not sure how they’ll handle homework though or outside projects
Detecting whether a student used ChatGPT to write an assignment can be challenging, but there are some signs and strategies you can consider:
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Unusual Language or Style: ChatGPT may produce content that is unusually advanced or complex for a student’s typical writing style or ability. Look for inconsistencies in language usage, vocabulary, and sentence structure.
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Inconsistent Knowledge: ChatGPT’s knowledge is based on information up to its last training cut-off in September 2021. If the assignment contains information or references to events or developments that occurred after that date, it might indicate that they used an AI model.
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Generic Information: If the content of the assignment seems to consist of general or widely available information without specific personal insights or original thought, it could be a sign that ChatGPT was used.
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Inappropriate Sources: Check the sources cited in the assignment. If they cite sources that are unusual or not relevant to the topic, it may indicate that they generated the content using an AI model.
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Plagiarism Detection Tools: Use plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin or Copyscape, to check for similarities between the assignment and online sources. While these tools may not specifically detect AI-generated content, they can identify similarities between the assignment and publicly available text.
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Interview or Discussion: Consider discussing the assignment topic with the student during a one-on-one interview or discussion. If they struggle to explain or elaborate on the content, it may indicate they didn’t personally generate it.
It’s important to approach these situations with caution and avoid making accusations without concrete evidence. If you suspect that a student used an AI model to complete an assignment, consider discussing your concerns with the student and offering them the opportunity to explain or rewrite the assignment in their own words.
This was definitely written by ChatGPT
You can tell because it’s grammatically correct but logically incongruous. For example:
ChatGPT’s knowledge is based on information up to its last training cut-off in September 2021. If the assignment contains information or references to events or developments that occurred after that date, it might indicate that they used an Al model.
That is the exact opposite of the conclusion you could draw.
Could have just been a brain fart/typo
ChatGPT overuses the phrase “it’s important to …” That alone should send up red flags.
Now sing it as a pirate shanty!
Best tip is to use chatgpt yourself and you learn to spot obvious stuff like this at literally the first sentence!
It is tribal to circumvent gpt specific bullet
Like:
train it with snippets of your writing style.
Tell it to use specific sources
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Like I’ve said from the start
