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Comment by notduncansmith | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t address the first point of the parent, which is that if AI can pass the essay Turing test, then perhaps college students shouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars and spending hundreds of hours learning to produce essays? If essays are a proxy for some other process, perhaps we should find a better proxy.

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Am a university professor who frequently assigns essays, so this is something I've been thinking a lot about. The problem is not that AI can successfully write a college-level essay (maybe someday, but certainly GPT-2 isn't even close to that level yet). It's that something along the lines of GPT-2 can emulate the superficial appearance of an essay. The actual facts, quotes, and references it generates are generally nonsensical, but the structure, grammar and language seem authentic at first glance. Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud.

The issue isn't so much that AI has replaced essay writing. It's that it has the potential to create convincing (but fundamentally nonsensical/illogical) replicas of academic essays, which have the potential to make an already difficult job of assessment even harder (somewhat analogous to the problem of deepfakes).

By the way, I'm currently thinking about writing something on this topic; if anyone has any thoughts please get in touch. Contact info in my profile.

>>> Unfortunately, a lot of essays in university lecture courses are graded by underpaid TAs who are skimming quickly, and who might be inclined to give an AI-written essay a D or a C- for effort rather than recognizing it as fraud.

This raises an interesting point, which is that there seems to be a relationship between essay-writing and essay-reading. The students are able to cheat on essay-writing because the school is already cheating on essay-reading.

If we reach a point where essay-writing is unnecessary because it can be done by machine, it's a safe bet that essay-reading will also be done by machine. What will be the point of writing me an essay, if it's just a function of a prompt? Why not just send me the prompt?

Then professors will start to teach and assign the writing of prompts for essay-writing machines. "Write a prompt in less than 25 words that persuades analog31 to approve your project." And someone will come up with a prompt-writing machine, and a prompt-reading machine.

>This raises an interesting point, which is that there seems to be a relationship between essay-writing and essay-reading. The students are able to cheat on essay-writing because the school is already cheating on essay-reading.

When they pay so little why would a person spend hours reading and analyzing one essay. The bigger issue if the lack of resources devoted to grading and not that the people on the ground are cheating.

edit: I think the commentator's emphasis should be on the lack of resources and not a supposed negligence on the grader's part.

Indeed, I would say the system is cheating.

Imagine a model trained just on college essays, and you feed it an outline. A sentence or two intro, some topic sentences, and citations.

Probably if someone had a dataset of essays large enough, you could do this right now and cause a lot of trouble.

I frequently wonder why the cost of college is rising while the teaching / grading is relegated to teacher assistants, and now, AI.

Writing essays teaches people how to think and express ideas in a manner that allows the reader or listener to be engaged and also think and consider what’s being delivered. People who “wing it” are noticeable and don’t get the same engagement.

Doesn’t like /every/ good job require something along the lines of “Excellent Oral and Written communication”? Essays aren’t a proxy for anything, they are an end of itself. Just because this test essay can be written by an algorithm doesn’t mean that an algorithm can create actual original content you’d be expected to put out at a job.

The essays can be a learning or training exercise for the student. Required, but not graded. We had plenty in high school like this.

If the student gets the AI to do it, so be it. You'll get useless feedback and then you'll have to sit in a room and do it for real in the final exam - maybe you didn't need the practice, or maybe you'll wish you didn't waste your chances.

Exactly, it would be like colleges grading on the ability to add up long columns of numbers and complaining about spreadsheets.

At one time, being able to add up long columns of number accurately using only a pencil and paper was a valuable business skill, now not so much.

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