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Comment by sn0w_crash | Hacker News Reader

In high school we could pay the smart kid or someone’s older sibling to write a paper for you.

ChatGPT is amazing but getting someone else to do your work is not novel.

I’m also quite certain schools will implement an AI-detection mechanism, and wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI were to expose that as a product offering.

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I think you might be coming from a different socioeconomic perspective. The legions of C and B students would suggest that most kids do not have the means to buy someone else’s work.

As for the viability of an ai detector, if a human can’t recognize the difference in a fundamentally human dataset (language) there is no reason to suspect ML would be better suited to it. A watermarking scheme would be more effective.

I went to school in a lower income urban center. I think you underestimate the barter economy of lower income students in high schools. Money is not commonly used to trade. There are a lot of favors changing hands.

We used to trade bags of weed for student metro cards. Others trade lunch tickets for homework. I saw a student hand over their north face jacket and a cell phone to have someone else to take an AP exam for them. They later told their parents they were robbed on the way home.

As Jeff gold bloom would say: “life uhhh… finds a way.”

Re: watermarking, it’s exactly what I alluded to by “OpenAI May even expose this as a product.”

Instead of engaging in a technological arms race perhaps the solution is to give more emphasise to writing in class:

Make the pupils read, study, etc. then they get x hours in class to write their paper with only pen and paper allowed.

You can also do both and then compare. If what's produced at home is very different from what's produced in class...

But haven’t we solved this in the quant side? Let them cheat all they want then fail the midterm, which has proctors watching like hawks.

(Or if you can assemble a formula sheet and pull a b after copying answers from the back of the textbook then you earned it)

In some sense, yes - evaluation in high school math, physics, and similar quantitative fields has been reduced to proctored problem sets. Even in so-called advanced classes, this has come at a cost. Evaluations rarely assess creativity, independent reasoning, or even a non-trivial proof - because every problem must be part of a strictly time-limited problem set, with no space for real challenge or even a few hours of thought.

To date, writing has evaded this trap. Sure, students write short essays during timed exams, but they also wrestle with more complex ideas and topics in longer assignments. Those assignments often take days, or even weeks, to do well.

I’m not sure what the future of those longer assignments is. I’m a bit disturbed by the idea that reading widely, thinking deeply, and distilling a few pages of coherent thoughts may not be an important part of early education. (Schools don’t always teach this well today, but at least we expect them to try.)

Schools don’t teach it well because of no child left behind - how you write for a test is very different from how you’d write in a more literary or journalistic context.

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