Hacker News Reader

Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Some people are putting a lot of hope in AI text detectors to prevent ChatGPT usage in contexts like student essays, etc.

While these detectors are of course interesting from the hacker/academic points of view, I don't think they will really solve much in practice.

On the one hand, our (teachers') adversary is not ChatGPT. It's ChatGPT + a human, which will be aware of these techniques and can tweak the text to avoid detection.

On the other hand, even if we could detect generated texts with high accuracy, are we going to fail a student just because a black-box AI model says so? Doesn't seem very ethical to me. It's funny how some people worried about ChatGPT's ethical implications seem to be OK with this, just because it goes against their personal demon.

I don't think there is any realistic alternative to just assuming that these systems will be used wherever text is required and you can't physically watch the writer, and living with it.

View on HN

> On the other hand, even if we could detect generated texts with high accuracy, are we going to fail a student just because a black-box AI model says so? Doesn't seem very ethical to me.

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/

Well, that's bad practice, and I hope it's not too common. I teach at a non-elite university at a peripheral place and we use TurnItIn, but we would never fail anyone without a human check to see exactly why the work was flagged.

I took an accounting class and it required you to come in on Saturday for really long tests.

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

It's lazy writing, and the people who take these detectors at face value are the very same people who are easily fooled by AI text generators.

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.

I went through college using Wikipedia to not only make my outline but also provide citations. I'd then rewrite the articles in my own word. This greatly reduced the amount of preparation needed prior to writing. No shame, the majority of research papers done in unis are silly and regurgitation. Really technology is just getting good at eliminating busy work which will be the death kneel of liberal arts. Double rant: college is largely a waste of time for liberal arts classes.

>death kneel of liberal arts

Ah yes, one of those jack offs who disregard arguments because of a phone posting auto correct.

Do us a favor and get the COVID vaccines. They're safe and effective!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com