Technology

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.

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.

Talk to them?

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.

Detecting whether a student used ChatGPT to write an assignment can be challenging, but there are some signs and strategies you can consider:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

At the core of learning is for students to understand the content being taught. Using tools and shortcuts doesn't necessarily negate that understanding.

Using chatGPT is no different, from an acidemic evaluation standpoint, than having somebody else do an assignment.

Teachers should already be incorporating some sort of verbal q&a sessions with students to see if their demonstrated in-person comprehension matches their written comprehension. Though from my personal experience, this very rarely happens.

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

Company advertisers themselves to their customers...

Calling it cheating is the wrong way to think about it. If you had a TI 80 whatever in the early 90s, it was practically cheating when everyone else had crap for graphing calculators.

Cat GPT used effectively isn't any different than a calculator or an electronic typewriter. It's a tool. Use it well and you'll do much better work

These hand wringing articles tell us more about the paucity of our approach to teaching and learning than they do about technology.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

OpenAI is preparing teachers for the back-to-school season, releasing a guide on how to use ChatGPT in the classroom, months after educators raised the alarm on students turning to AI for cheating.

Bad news for teachers and professors though: OpenAI says that sites and apps promising to uncover AI-generated copy in students' work are unreliable.

Such content detectors also have a tendency to suggest that work by students who don't speak English as a first language is AI-generated, OpenAI stated, confirming a problem reported earlier by The Markup.

Teachers are concerned however that students are cheating by presenting ideas and phrases from the chatbot as their own, and that they are becoming over-dependent on a tool which remains prone to errors and hallucinations.

Professors began to detect students using ChatGPT to cheat on college essays a little over a month after the chatbot was released in November 2022.

OpenAI also acknowledged that ChatGPT is not free from biases and stereotypes, for instance, so "users and educators should carefully review its content."

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