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> cannot be won with the time and resources available to ordinary human teachers

By your description it clearly appears that whoever manages your company[1] is not actually interested in detecting cheating.

What you describe could be easily combated by giving teachers ability to fail blatant cheaters.

[1]At this point it is hard to pretend that it is university

I agree with every word you say.

In such case it seems that GPT-3 main effect is to make eroding standards easier. As while rules are not changed, cheaters can put less work to pass it by cheating than before.

So standards can be lowered while pretending (for now) that it has not happened.

> As I wrote in the Times last year, I think the technological arms race against GPT (and the economic conditions that mean it's used) cannot be won with the time and resources available to ordinary human teachers

Based on the rest of your post, there appears to be a stronger case that your students are setting a rather low bar for GPT to stumble over. It's unfortunate that there are so many cultures where widespread cheating is condoned, if not outright encouraged. They may be able to fool their teachers, but how much comfort will that be when the bridges are collapsing, the pipelines are exploding, the wind turbines are breaking apart, and all the other activities that ultimately report to reality and not some human superior who can be bluffed become impossible to continue?

> It's unfortunate that there are so many cultures where widespread cheating is condoned, if not outright encouraged. They may be able to fool their teachers, but how much comfort will that be when the bridges are collapsing, the pipelines are exploding, the wind turbines are breaking apart, and all the other activities that ultimately report to reality and not some human superior who can be bluffed become impossible to continue?

You're so right. But let me add some other feelings, so as not to sound like a racist or that British universities are some "great white hope" to overseas students. This had little to do with them being Indian. It's a generational thing. In all cultures we teach young people to game systems. Right from the get go they learn that if they can buy powerful tools, systems and access then that's fair game. They're just doing what they've been rewarded for their whole lives and want to make a better life. To them it's not cheating. I am the anachronistic throwback here I think.

Bullshit. Cheating is far more common in the hyper competitive cultures like India and China. That behavior would be obviously identified as cheating in most western cultures. Not that cheating isn’t a big problem in these cultures too, but not to nearly the same scale.

> My unwritten instructions are not to take language into account much. I must attend mainly to the technical content.

Interesting, at my non-English, run-off-the-mill university there were modules / seminars in CompSci where large amounts of language errors in essays (even if written in English, a non-native language for the majority of staff and students) could ruin the grade. ^^

My undergrad even had a "banned error list", which would get you kicked down half a grade on any paper.

> automatic re-writers and scripts to test against Turnitin until it passes

Like an ad-hoc GAN where Turnitin is the discriminator. Interesting.

> Students who cheat have a formidable array of tools now, not just GPT but automatic re-writers and scripts to test against Turnitin until it passes.

Conduct tests in a room with all electronics confiscated

What major was it?

I can't say. That would identify the students and that's unfair.

But, a technical subject that could be assessed in other, better ways [1], and for which written essays are rather easy to template and do keyword bingo to get a bare pass.

[1] Making the professor read 100 essays is a cheap option.

Yeah, in my EE major I never really had to write an essay. I have no idea why English/USA universities are fixated on them (or so it seems based on comments from the internet). Lab/project reports, seminar talks - I did these instead.