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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

Is this a situation where it's not cheating to use a chatbot for the output? I understand it becomes nuanced if you edit the output, but still.

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This is cheating and while it might not be picked up in a high school essay, it will certainly be flagged for plagiarism at almost all Universities. It's very dangerous to do this unless your course specifically asks you to answer using AI tools, like the course in the OP.

When you say "it will be flagged" do you mean that it would be considered cheating under existing academic dishonesty policies? or do you mean that the plagiarism-detection tools currently in use at universities can reliably detect the output of ChatGPT, new Bing, etc. that were only released publicly in the last few months

If you're just worried about the pragmatics of being caught, I'd keep in mind that ChatGPT doesn't actually have a very high "dynamic range" given some specific set of inputs. If you use it enough, or explore the same topics and prompts enough, you'll quickly start to see structures, words, phrases, presentations that its output gravitates towards.

These may not be enough of a watermark to generally detect what was written by an AI and what wasn't yet, but it does suggest that the proliferation of AI-written assignment essays will quickly produce a catalog of plagiarism sources that works with existing tools.

In other words, once people submit enough AI-written essays about popular assignment A, existing plagiarism detection tools will easily start to notice the phrases/sequences/structures that it statistically gravitates towards (because that's what it does by design!) and start detecting these in later work. That software won't know what's AI written or not, but it will think that your submission may be plagiarized because a lot of it looks pretty specifically familiar.

Going a bit further... the AI tooling will also be used elsewhere, in things that not-just-students read. So writing style will potentially drift/evolve to be like AI writers, and this will muddy the detection efforts. I know I've noticed numerous times how I pick up on and start using phrasing (and other tells automatically), matching what others do over the years.

Of course, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the above effect doesn't manifest. It's very dependent on how much AI writing spreads across numerous areas, and whether kids-these-days do any measurable amounts of long-form reading.

> can reliably detect the output of ChatGPT.

I imagine schools will have to put minimal value in out of person assignments, relying on proctored exams for final grades. This might be an investment opportunity!

If students acknowledge that they used ChatGPT and what the prompt was (as required by the OP), then it's not plagiarism.

But I think many professors who don't accept AI as a writing aide would say that it doesn't satisfy the assignment and is worth zero points.

Using AI output isn’t plagiarism. Finders keepers. You push the button, you get the copyright, just like a camera.

Now, whether it is ghostwriting is another matter.

It's not settled law yet. Many jurisdictions seem inclined to assign no copyright at all to AI-generated works, like the United States and the European Union.

Copyright doesn't matter. It's about academic honesty, not whether you have the right to use the work. You can even plagiarize your own work.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement have some overlap but they're distinct. You can be guilty of plagiarism by taking something in the public domain and presenting it as your own work.

What about simply helping your child with their homework at all? That could also count as cheating if you go with a strict interpretation.

For a reasonable interpretation, I offer this (in the context of programming): "The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. [--] Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you." https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/honesty/

This is where AI could act as a good equalizer.

Having access to people who can sit down with you and explain things to you when you get stuck, or who can point out mistakes in your existing understanding or your work, can make a huge difference in the outcomes of students.

If AI gets good enough to fill that role, everyone can have that access (or at least something close enough).

Pretty sure that would require AGI, and is at least well beyond the means of LLMs.

You can ask ChatGPT why your code is not working right, and often it will give a helpful suggestion. Sure, the suggestion may be wrong or misleading, but it can help you get unstuck in any case.

That's a huge distance away from it being a tutor. A tutor would have a plan for how to educate you, and would consistently choose examples and problems to present in order to demonstrate the knowledge they are seeking to impart. It's not about giving you little hints, it's essentially the very opposite.

In my mind, what you are describing is the responsibility of the teacher. I was thinking more along the lines of how parents help their children in their homework. Like the grandparent wrote:

> who can sit down with you and explain things to you when you get stuck, or who can point out mistakes in your existing understanding or your work

That being said, I don't see why what you describe would require AGI. It won't be an excellent teacher or tutor in those tasks, but it may be good enough and make up in the price, availability and repetition.

It can already do super useful stuff, basically google search, gather results, summarize, (hallucinate, ) which makes it faster and sometimes easier to do this kind of research. Let's be honest, not everyone is so good at reading comprehension, it's an important thing taught and tested in school after all. ChatGPT can basically help those lacking in reading comprehension and research skills and create summaries for them.

Why would you expect the AI to not be a paid service like a human tutor is? ChatGPT has a $0 tier, but it's also in a publicity phase, and they already have a "pro" subscription tier. Microsoft/GitHub likewise are charging for extended access to Copilot, and so is Stability with their Dream Studio application.

It'll be cheaper for the school, the parents or the social services to provide you access to an AI tutor than to more human instruction. Already, learning games can prevent or cure (some) learning disabilities via engagement and repetition in a cost-effective way.

You can help your kid understand something without telling them the answer directly.

If you wrote your child's essay that is cheating. If the child cannot formulate the arguments themselves, I'm not sure what the point of the assignment is.

The article talks about it being required, so I assumed this was a similar scenario, personally.

1. I'm not going to take the moral highroad here. He's clearly going for an IT education. I think it's great that he is exploring these options.

2. He involved me, and we're making this a great learning experience.

3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.

I don't understand or like schools that take a tough stance on computer-checking for plagarism and so on, that's just sad, but if the school thinks using this tool is cheating, then I'd avoid it.

I've already heard that schools think that chatbots are a crisis, they can't do essay hand-ins anymore due to this, but maybe there are different approaches where they can handle it. Maybe some think for example that they can see through it and grade down if it is an apparent problem for the handed-in text anyway.

They will probably have to start to test for the specific required skills in-class. Nobody is trying to test your knowledge of the multiplication table, or the trigonometric relations by allowing you to take the assignment home (or use a calculator during the test).

Bottom of the heap? Ai essays suck. They’re painful to read for the most part. The only reason they look good is because the average person has undeveloped writing and critical thinking skills, so that comparatively they sometimes look okay. Refusing to learn to write is the opposite of the right approach here

When I started secondary school in the UK, the home economics teacher (i.e. cooking and sewing) in the first lesson had a rant about how she absolutely did not want to see anyone write up their cooking with the phrase "I think it tasted quite nice" because it was a generic and content-free cliché.

That's the standard ChatGPT has to beat to make you look good at school.

Likewise, the average comments section is all you have to beat to seem erudite as an adult.

>Likewise, the average comments section is all you have to beat to seem erudite as an adult.

I hope you do not seriously think "comment sections" is how you measure adult scale intelligence. I admit many people are not as intelligent as they should be but that is in fact a source of many of life's ills, and if you care about your life and your society you should want better than "beating the standard."

I don't think that intelligence itself is likely to change depending on the level to which one's essay writing skills happen to be trained.

This is one reason why I wrote "erudite" instead of "intelligent".

The power of writing is that it is the way we formulate thoughts, opinions, and arguments. Language is the key way people frame their thoughts, and writing is one significant way to develop one's language skills. Writing is more than syntax, grammar, spelling and word choice--that's why you're not considered "unintelligent" for using a thesaurus or spell-check.

Anyhow, my entire point is "beating the comment section" isn't valuable as a threshold because as you hint at, it isn't really a place to find intelligent discussion.

None of those things were part of what they taught me at the mandatory school lessons, only at the entirely optional after-school "convincing communication" 45 minute session they had one time.

Actual school was basically "prove you actually read this Shakespeare play we assigned to you by mentioning some of these standard points".

As for comments sections… that they're low quality is the reason I chose them as an example, beating them necessarily improves the quality of global discourse - the people writing them don't recognise their poor quality.

https://xkcd.com/810/

ChatGPT is way above your average high school level.

So students should… not try to learn how to organize their thoughts?

> Bottom of the heap? Ai essays suck. They’re painful to read for the most part.

I'm just responding to that part

I don't think this is accurate at all. Our sales team is using ChatGPT and others to rewrite sales copy to make it more interesting and increase engagement.

Initial results are WILDLY successful.

If the user is a capable writer who can organize their thoughts and recognize the difference between good and bad copy, they're going to get much more coherent results from tools like ChatGPT. I'd contend that an average primary/secondary-schooler is basically expected to develop those exact skills, without which their AI generated essays will have a multitude of problems just like human-composed ones do.

> 1. I'm not going to take the moral highroad here. He's clearly going for an IT education. I think it's great that he is exploring these options.

Every developed country has a general path to education because you want well balanced citizen and not ultra specialised tools.

> 3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.

Why didn't you write his essay before AI was a thing ? They'd be on top of the heap.

Why don't you pay a cheap freelance copywriter for like 1$ an hour to write the essays ?

The goal of education, especially at that level, is to build your basic skills, not to perform and deliver

> pay a cheap freelance copywriter for like 1$ an hour to write the essays

I am willing to bet there is no freelance copywriter doing American high school essays for $1 an hour. Or at least none that aren’t using chatGPT :D

I don't know why you want to hobble your child. He will be generating essays but one day he will be in a situation he cannot generate an essay, he won't be able to google, like say a presentation to a client or colleagues, and he will be caught, whereas his competition who do not need a crutch to write (or for a presentation, say make arguments on his feet) will not. You certainly don't need to overwork your kid, but why even bother educating your child if this is how you approach education? May be he needs to legally finish high school, but after HS why not let him chatGPT his way into a job if you think it is sufficient?

>your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.

This is absolutely a terrible attitude. Who cares about the "top essay" if they're all AI generated. None of the 25 students are good students, and unless they will fail into a good job at daddy's hedgefund, you will simply not become a proficient adult letting chatGPT do your homework for you. The entire point of writing essays is to formulate opinions and thoughts and defend them. I understand school sucks and sometimes you have to write essays for things you don't care about, and that is a problem. But, at some point, you need to learn how to write if you want to be a professional. Not doing so just means you're holding yourself back for reasons I don't quite understand.

i agree. I think this is analogous to flying a modern airliner. After all, anyone can set the autopilot. Easy, right? Easy until a situation arises where manual flying or human intervention is required. That is when years of tedious training becomes instantly relevant, when the machine can't handle an edge case that requires a novel solution. Can you imagine a medical doctor or an airline pilot who chatgpted his/her way into a license?

An IT degree isn't a zero sum game. Try asking the AI how to teach a child something

About (3): Being #1 in school rarely translates to #1 in life. Make it not about "winning" but a growth mindset: what can we learn today. Learn to learn and accept that we are always growing and never experts.

> If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap.

If you tell AI to write a research paper, even in an abstract field like math or philosophy where experiments are not required, it's not going to actually generate new knowledge. That's the point of learning to write papers in school--evaluating the evidence, and proposing and supporting a thesis. The AI can output something that looks like a paper, but it doesn't actually have any coherent thesis.

I do think it will become more common to use AI as a typing aid (predicting next words/phrases), but having AI actually generate the thesis and arguments of the paper is not doing anything useful. That said, even if you didn't use it at all, I'm not convinced your paper would somehow be worse than all the others, it would just take longer to write.

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