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Comment by edwcross | Hacker News Reader

Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty".

Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers.

Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations.

This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing how stupid so many teachers are. But when someone spent thousands for a tool, which purports to be reliable, and is so quick to use, how can an average person resist it? The teacher is as lazy as the cheaters they intend to catch.

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Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this.

The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.

Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.

But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working.

And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.

It's also the case that even pre-Web and certainly pre-LLMs, different schools and even departments within schools had different rules about working with other students on problem sets. In some cases, that was pretty much the norm, in others strictly verboten.

It’s strange watching people put so much faith in these so called “AI detection tools”. Nobody really knows how they work yet they’re treated like flawless judges. In practice they’re black boxes that quietly decide who gets flagged for “fraud”, and because the tool said so everyone pretends it must be true. The result is a neat illusion that all the “cheaters” were caught, when in reality the system is mostly just picking people at random and giving the process a fake sense of certainty.

Bizzare and unfair

I hope this could be a "teachable moment" for all involved: have some students complete their assignments in person, then submit their "guaranteed to be not AI written" essays to said AI detection tool. Objectively measure how many false positives it reports.

Famously, a popular AI detector "determined" the Declaration of Independence was written by AI.

https://decrypt.co/286121/ai-detectors-fail-reliability-risk...

In the United States, we all used to take a required course called Civics.

We learned how government and justice worked.

> Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works"

And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.

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