Teachers are using AI to grade essays. Some experts are raising ethical concerns | Hacker News Reader

Teachers are using AI to grade essays. Some experts are raising ethical concerns

cnn.com

56 pointsrntn74 comments

The future will be teachers using AI to grade essays that students used AI to generate.

Actually, an AI grader in student hands would allow them to get continuous feedback on their writing, leading to something that would ultimately grade well if the teacher graded it by themselves or not; in that case the LLM is just teaching the kid how to write instead of the teacher, and might be a real valid use of AI. No, the real dangers is that the writing will become very dry and overly polished, looking more and more like corp speak that executives use to communicate in emails, sucking the humanity out of writing. If AI can ever really understand word rhythm (if you write a lot, you know this concept in one form or another), we are doomed.

I was thinking about that when I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of my students. I could have used AI to do it, but I wanted to give it an actual human touch.

It occurred to me at the time, that they probably got a lot of letters of recommendation. And it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they used AI to assess them.

Which of course got me thinking that we could just cut out all this writing business and have a one click solution to generate the letter of recommendation and then have it assessed.

And we could use the same thing for cover letters, marketing copy, and anything else that's bullshit. :)

One click is aiming too low. We could get to zero click letters of recommendation.

Student's AI (SAI) predicts student will want to apply for college. Based off student's preferences, interests, conversations, queries, browser history, SAI predicts you would be a good source to ask for a reference and fires off a request.

Your AI (YAI) fields the request and consults your gradebook, notes, security camera footage of your student in and around class, and your own idiosyncrasies and comes up with a general idea of how strong your letter of recommendation would be.

YAI and SAI then negotiate whether the student would want to ask for your letter of recommendation given how strong it would likely be. Once an agreement is reached, YAI composes the letter, leaves a message for you that it is about to your recommend a student allowing you a short window to edit or countermand.

a recent south park episode was about exactly this

Teachers are using AI to generate multiple choices tests from reading assignments and assigning to students via all-in-one portals.

There are a host of services that leverage multi-modal open models tailored to everything right now, from generating syllabi and course shells to handling your ARD. It's removing the administrative overhead that computerization promised in the 70s and 80s that largely stalled out because IT management had to manufacture some dependence to keep their jobs.

I kind of like this as a productive use of LLMs. A rare case where I can imagine the model would be more effective than a skilled human.

The unfortunate reality is that the typical teacher is quite bad at actually building assessments, so the bar is really quite low.

I’m not saying this as a knock against teachers. It’s just not typically in their skill set, and there’s a lot of hidden complexity involved in building a good assessment. It’s likely that the majority of HNers would be similarly bad at it.

This is outdated. Educators have already realized this. Things have pivoted to using AI to generate assignments, homework and tests. In the past these assignments came from specialized coursework books that were edited, and came with a teacher edition to explain rationale and learning goals. This has all been thrown out and replaced with AI. Now that AI is making coursework, and combined with overworked teachers, there is a lack of oversight in what AI is generating.

My first impression is that teachers would primarily be doing this if schools are understaffed and teachers are overworked.

But I'm sure there's a million other factors as well i.e. you're saving time regardless.

> if schools are understaffed and teachers are overworked

More the norm than the exception. This is still good, though, because the public being unwilling to appropriately fund education is almost a law of nature.

I remember taking college classes where one had an online test. I typed in the correct answer, however because I formatted it differently than what the test expected...I failed the question. How many times have we seen these chat AIs give wrong answers? I could see a student given a correct answer but the AI failing it because AI really isn't that smart.

I really expect there to be major major issues with the advent of AI, not in that it's taking over people's work (although thats a big issue) but simply that people will rely on AI to be correct when it's actually wrong. AI is based on existing knowledge (and since it's been taught off the internet, it most likely has a lot of wrong information). We need people to a) check the work of the AI b) still need people to do new research and collect new data.

I was naive when this AI era was first getting started. My instinct was to worry about students doing the cheating, not getting cheated.

Students have always been getting cheated.

What cheating is there if the students actually learn?

This essay is Copyright (C) 2024 by John Doe and is my own intellectual property. It is licensed to you for a specific and limited set of purposes described herein. The essay shall not under any circumstances be shared with third parties. By accepting this essay you agree to abide by the licensing terms, and you acknowlege serious harm would result from any breach of these terms, entitling me to injunctive relief, specific performance and monetary damages, in addition to any other remedies at law.

Or if that doesn't work... embed a prompt injection attack?

In all seriousness, there’s already precedent re ownership / use of assessment performances. Long story short, schools students seldom have the agency to a place these restrictions.

I have no problem with this, as long as teachers then curate and fix LLM output. If you do you probably don’t have kids in school and don’t know what passes for “grading” otherwise. The opportunity to further reduce quality is just not there.

In a weird way this might end up helping students learn since they now have to carefully go over their work again after it's been graded to catch all the instances where an unreliable AI screwed them out of a grade they rightly earned.

Not sure that that's the best use of a students time, but re-grading their own work to check for AI errors could help them remember the material

Students that care about results already do this, AI aside.

This is really bad. I can see many teachers defending the result the AI gives a student out of stubbornness and fear of being discovered using it. And that’s a disaster.

From what I've read, many teachers using AI for grading are being supplied commercial AI tools by the schools themselves. They're expected to be using it. Given the trend towards lower budgets and larger classes, I can't imagine pushback against AI tools being taken very seriously by administrators.

But then how do you know who’s actually learning?

Future is looking genuinely bleak.

I am honestly really sorry for everyone growing up right now.

Wasn't this a b-plot in South Park recently?

Honestly if we replaced teachers with AI teachers, everyone would benefit.

For some reason we glorify the current state of teachers. The truth is that the whole education system is borked at all levels.

I'm sure there are some good teachers, like my mother who actually cared about teaching or the ones I personally had as teachers growing (can count them on one hand without using all digits), but most are just there because it is really easy to become a teacher these days.

Replace failing schools and low quality teachers with AI systems that can educate and empower the next generation through individualized attention and help.

Imagine learning about ancient Rome not through some stupid video while the teacher snoozes, but by "talking" to Marcus Aurelius. Or learning chemistry and physics in a virtual lab where Marie Curie "guides" you about radiation and its effects, and so on.

I am reminded of Principal Skinner’s vision of a school of the future, some 30 years ago.

“Magnets, always with the magnets.”

The reality is that you’re basically describing multimedia. The other reality is that you’re probably projecting your experience with the American education system onto the entire world, no surprises there. There are many other countries that get education a whole lot more right than the US.

Students are using AI to write their essays. Teachers are using AI to grade their essays.

Engineers are using AI to write code. Other engineers are using AI to review that code.

Same thing will happen in many other areas of life.

Email is needlessly padded out by an AI writing assistant. Recipient uses AI to generate the tl;dr version.

The 8th OSI layer.

The absolute worst case where I see this is in generating acceptance criteria for tickets. It drives me insane, because so many of the acceptance criteria needlessly overlap so it's even harder to figure out what's going on.

Students and teachers using AI to do their work for them is unethical.

I'm not convinced engineers are broadly using AI to write anything important, or that AI code reviews are a significant part of any companies bottom line.

This is a CNN article written by someone lacking the sophistication to actually handle the subject.

Maybe the article was written by an AI.

Maybe this comment too!

In hindsight perhaps this wasn't the best username to pick...

I'm glad Harmonic lets you filter some articles. the guardian, cnn and bcc articles have become a tumor on my timeline.

To quote Zizek:

"that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want"

...why even bother with essays at all then. This is some kind of insane "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" setup that benefits nobody.

> benefits nobody

That would be the point. Why bother at all?

Because brain development happens under external stress, and absent that people stay dumb.

Source?

Students shouldn’t be turning in essays. They should turn in the chat history with an LLM. We need to go beyond just putting your own thoughts into words but instead guiding students on how to explore and hone their own thoughts with AI.

If they come up with metprocesses to game this, that’s a win.

They'd just ask ChatGPT to invent a suitably profound prompt history, and that's it?

The situation is that school want to teach people to write, a difficult skill. But the problem is being a bureaucracy schools actually operate by "turn in two shitty half-assed essays every semester and eventually we hope you'll learn".

And now chatGpt can duplicate that and there's no real skill involved in getting it to do that and neither do they "explore and hone their own thoughts" in this process, mostly you can just an assignment to ChatGpt.

I feel like we should be doing again an analysis from first principles, determining the purpose behind having students learn X, and determine how useful it is given today's context. If AI can do X well enough, then students should really be taught how to use it to do X for them. Or perhaps there isn't even a need for X at all anymore; just a nice-to-know.

> "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" setup that benefits nobody

It benefits the existing social structures, so they don't actually have to change with the times but can remain in a half-assed patched state that barely holds on because nobody wants to deal with the full rewrite.

It's a process. Maybe it'll stick as a ritual.

To quote me: "That's what happens when you go listen to philosophers. You get ideas. Wrong ones."

I spent a lot of time with academic philosophers and have found precisely fuck all insight.

The best philosophic ideas I’ve read come from programmers and builders. I don’t know why that connection exists. My hunch is that programming and philosophy both deal in the abstract so are inherently connected somehow.

> I don’t know why that connection exists

It doesn’t. The meaningful connection is between other programmers and you. Same reason some people like sports metaphors. The medium is the message.

Philosophy deals with things that sound good but don’t work in reality. So does programming. I think that’s where the inherent connection is.

I was going to put a facetious comment about Marx’s grave and my contribution to philosophy but I’ll leave that for another post.

I can't believe people think this guy is anything other than utterly full of shit and a fraud.

That quote is totally moronic as usual.

I would even say I don't want to read anything by anyone who thinks Zizek has anything interesting to say. Instant block or else I may become infected by the stupidity.

Some of us take pride in the fact we aren't.

I suspect we'll be all that is left in the information decay we face.

Most of life is just conformity anyway. I agree with you, but your strategy won't get you ahead, if anything it will make it worse.

  If you're a man, you're the last man.

I don’t desire being ahead, just academic and intellectual honesty.

Learning is unique as the whole point is to do the thinking yourself.

Advertisers are using AI to write ad copy. Consumers are using AI to read and ignore ads.

So, developers and users get into an AI war over CAPTCHAs. ...and, well, welcome to the latent dystopia :(.

Consumers are using AI to read and ignore ads

Could you share some examples? (genuine question)

Well, that's in some sense what these new large language models are all about: if all I want is the information from a website, it makes much more sense for me to have an AI read it and give me a summary than to wade through ads... but that means the only ad impressions are from AI bots... which means more attempts at enforcing that actual human eyeballs see ads... which means more captchas and more digital rights management. And, lo and behold, right around the time that this become an issue, we see Google starting to lead the charge on merging WebDRM into Chrome, and every social media company locking down their content with login walls and refusing alternative clients.

This use case is just going to get bigger, though: the premise of ad blockers has a manifest destiny on just looking at the page and picking out the ads, which is possible and not particularly difficult to do even in the ridiculous case of a web page returning its content as a single giant PNG file, even if the ad is a watermark, and even if the "ad" is just a bunch of conspicuous mentions of Mountain Dew strewn throughout every time a placeholder noun is required. (I am legally obligated to note here that this comment was sponsored by Mountain Dew.)

Mostly I find AI is useful for software engineering in very legitimate ways. It's a far better alternative to Stack Overflow. It's super helpful when writing boilerplate.

When ChatGPT writes its own LLM to offload all the stupid shit that humanity asks of it, we'll know that it's actually intelligent.

Just today I was thinking it may turn out to be beneficial for LLMs to be kept unaware of their own nature.

So in some sense there is a chance that this has already happened.

Awareness implies consciousness. So good news, LLMs are already unaware of their own nature.

If you search the r/localllama community on reddit, there have been attempts at fine tuning base models with all references to AI and assistants and that sort of thing removed, in trying to convince the model that it's actually human.

What really results from that is a fundamental disconnect of what it thinks it can do and what it can physically do, it's like a cognitive dissonance simulator that quickly derails itself. The best models know exactly what they are, and it's what seemingly keeps them self consistent and coherent.

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them" - Socrates

And he was right. The recall people were capable of on prelitersts societies was astonishing.

Everyone got dumber but society benefited because recalling was harder than reading.

People think in binaries whether they realise it or not. The idea that something was lost or weakened when writing became the dominant means of encoding information for long term storage is a difficult idea for most people to grapple with.

It used to be normal to memorise hour long speeches in the ancient world. Today people struggle with 20 lines. You can make the case that nothing of value was lost, but something was definitely lost.

Well he wasn't wrong, in a sense. If I know I can check something somewhere at any time I'll never really remember it, just the vague notion of it and the process for looking it up. It has to be some sort of mental optimization that offloads what isn't critical to remember.

It still amazes me how in the ancient world they were capable of successfully transferring information from generation to generation through pure word of mouth, accurately remembering all aspects to a T. It just seems impossible now.

I can't imagine AI is very good at grading, as in ingesting the entire internet, it has converged on the median, most average writing.

Since students themself use AI to write essays, those grading AI will be evaluating the most average writing anyway. We've now come full circle, just losing our ability to write in the process.

The hero's journey: end up back where you started, having gained something in the process.

AI's journey: end up back where you started, having lost something in the process.

The AI gains more training data. It's not exactly the Odyssey, but still.

The AI is inbreeding. Model collapse is imminent.

Exactly. It would be amazing if the same LLM were used for both generation and grading, and could see what tweaks the human (student) made before turning it in. That would be very useful training data.

If you know what you’re doing, you can achieve near-human-quality judgements of literacy performances using classical NLP methods. LLMs pretty much get us over the line.

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