A college student made an app to detect AI-written text

Similarly, this is why we students have been required to cite sources instead of simply rendering an opinion on a topic. Most of these AI bots are just fancy plagiarism machines.

Edit: by Escape Room, I mean like the fun kind you would go to with friends or colleagues. I'm not saying we should torture children... Google if you haven't heard of one.

But wow, the second response was pretty exciting. I wonder if chatgpt can get present-day authors to up their game?

Within the context, this is a ambiguous in a way that would be unrealistic, like a bit of a micro-Chekhov's gun.

In all seriousness though, this is really a cat and mouse game. Working in CV I might be biased to think that images are going to be easier to detect than text, but we are going to get better. I'm not saying we shouldn't create detectors (we should), but I think we also need to be aware that this is a cat and mouse game and we need to have true social conversations about this. Though we still fail to have these conversations when it comes to computer security so maybe we're doomed (or maybe this will be the catalyst). It's also important to note that a lot of damage can be done even with images and text that are easy to detect as fake. I've seen plenty of fake Twitter and Linkedin accounts that use StyleGAN profile pictures (with all the telltale signs).

I'm curious what kind of model you're using? How interpretable is it?

Then is it a problem if a human slightly modified an AI's work? Isn't that the desirable outcome? And if the work itself is so useless that it would be worthy of a zero grade, then perhaps another way of measuring usefulness should be used.

In a way, I feel like we can't impose old-world grading techniques to new-world content synthesis technologies.

Writing was easier than studying for me.

For this reason, outside of my math & science majors, I chose exclusively courses where the grade was based on written work.

But likewise, I wasn't in college to get an empty credential. I already had a marketable skill -- programming. Learning was fun, but I was also conscious of the fact that I didn't want to waste my parents' money.

The writing has affected my career: My work involves not necessarily writing papers, but certainly communicating ideas and knowledge to other people, including non-specialists.

As co-founder and CTO of any number of tech companies, I've observed engineers (programmers) with broad humanities (history and language related, mostly) education tend to grok business narratives then architect and write better software: coherent systems expressed concisely. Now I look for history major with comp sci minor, or English and linear algebra, or other self-selected humanities + STEM pairings.

I'd hazard there's some relationship in how the mind is applied in common between domain driven design in service of business narrative and the sweeping cause and effect of history, or between software architecture and well organized long-form writing.

ChatGPT wrote that, not me. How do we know we aren't simply reading ChatGPT arguing with itself?

There will be paid ChatGPT services for cheating students, the ideal solution would be to rethink and rehaul how student performance is evaluated, but universities will instead pay something like Turnitin because throwing money at a problem is always easier than thinking.

My guess is that students just have to spend 3-5 hours on a Saturday writing essays, doing programming assignments etc…

I like ChatGPT and spend quite a few hours a week working with it; it's a lot more interesting than just a text generator. That said, people using it to do schoolwork for them are short-changing themselves, because they're opting out of developing core cognitive skills.

We already have that, today.

With fantastic tools such as TurnItIn[0], that regularly flags my own work as plagiarizing my own work. And we see with those tools, already, there is a presumption of guilt. The professor will believe the tool over the student, often without the slightest glance to see why said tool is saying the student is guilty.

[0] https://www.turnitin.com/

EDIT: On second thought, one can just put more emphasis on exams taken in-premises with supervision.

Don’t pretend, we will see you ;)

exams will show what you’re really capable of.

lol

but if i were an english teacher assigning research-like papers, i'd definitely incorporate chatgpt responses into my assignments. make them write a draft with chatgpt3 then revise it themselves in class with pen and paper. then write a version in their own words without plagiarizing the chatgpt version, but they can only use google docs or some format that can track changes, so the teacher can see the process. or something like that — it would need some iterating and real-world feedback.

So a student that takes said output and hands it in is plagiarizing by claiming credit for something written by a different "author".

It'll probably take some time for language to evolve around non-human agents. There's no intrinsic reason to prefer separating (or combining) that terminology by humanness of agent, afaik. At least, for common usage. One will win and only time will tell.

Also, There's a commonly understood threshold for plagiarism where a single word won't qualify and a phrase probably won't qualify, but a whole paragraph does. That is why Grammarly isn't plagarism, not because it is software.

So in an academic context, for grading your understanding, it becomes meaningless to grade something written by a machine instead of by you. In other contexts, it's totally fine.

Similarly, OpenAI's tools can be used to create all sorts of content marketing and other webspam. They they'll create a monetizable search engine-killer that knows how to ignore all this fluff (which will probably constitute 99% of the internet within a few years).