Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI
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I would like to hire students who actually have skills and know their material. Or even better, if AI is actually the amazing learning tool many claim then it should enhance their learning and as a result help them succeed in tests without any AI assistance. If they can't, then clearly AI was a detriment to them and their learning and they lack the ability to think critically about their own abilities.
If everyone is supposed to use AI anyway, why should I ever prefer a candidate who is not able to do anything without AI assistance over someone who can? And if you hold the actual opinion that proper ai-independent knowledge is not required, then why should I hire a student at all instead of buying software solutions from AI companies (and maybe put a random person without a relevant degree in front of it)?
Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs.
> put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them
Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.
One friend now uses a dashcam to record themselves when writing an assignment so they can prove no AI was used when they are eventually flagged.
> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees.
I don't know about that. I can't speak for the US, but at the university where I got my degrees (Math & CS) and later worked prerequisite in-person tests to be allowed to take a given exam were not rare. Most modules had lectures (professor), tutorials (voluntary in-person bonus exercises and tutors to ask questions) and exercise groups where solutions to mandatory exercises were discussed. In the latter sometimes an additional part of the exam requirements was to present and explain a solution at least once or twice over the course of the semester. And some had small, mandatory bi-weekly tests as part of the requirement too.
Obviously I can understand that this would not work equally well in each kind of academic programme.
All good!
> I can't speak for the US
I just had to respond to this as the implication of being American touched a nerve, haha. Australian here.
> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.
When I started uni (slovenia, 2007) the rules were simple: You are adults. The final exam (written + oral) is 100% of your grade. We don’t have the time or willingness to police what you do. Strongly recommend attending classes and doing homework but whatever it’s your life. If you get high enough scores on the optional midterms, you can skip the written portion of the exam.
It was pretty great. Yes we all tried to cram for exams at the last moment. No it didn’t work very well. Needing 2 or 3 tries to pass was common.
Then later we got the bologna system. Professors stopped bragging about fail rates. Students passing became an actual thing they were evaluated on. Homework became graded, midterms were mandatory and part of your grade, attendance was tracked, etc.
College became like high school. More people passed but I think something was lost about teaching adulthood.
For the record: I didn’t graduate. My freelance business got too busy and I could not keep up with both.
$$$
There’s a lot of interacting parts as to why many places have arrived where we are where cheap ghost writers (AI or not) can so easily negatively impact education. But it pretty much all comes down to costs.
I've been wondering lately if one of the good things to come out of heavy LLM use will be a return to mostly in-person interactions once nothing that happens online is trustworthy anymore.
Universities make money not by teaching, but by testing and certifying. That's why AI is so disruptive in that space.
Granted, I’m 62, so I’m from the old world. I attended college, and taught a couple of college classes, before the AI revolution. There was definitely a connection between learning and evaluation for most students. In fact most students preferred more evaluation, not less, such as graded quizzes and homeworks rather than just one great big exam at the end. Among other things, the deadlines and feedback helped them budget their efforts. Also, the exercise of getting something right and hitting a deadline is not an overt purpose of education, but has a certain pragmatic value.
Again, showing my age, in the pre-AI era, the technology of choice was cheating. But there were vanishingly few students who used cheating to circumvent the evaluations while actually learning anything from their courses.
If teaching and certifying could be separated, they would be. In fact, it has happened to some extent for computer programming, hence the “coding interview” and so forth. But computer programming is also an unusual occupation in that it’s easy to be self taught, and questionable whether it needs to be taught at the college level.
There should be a class that teaches you how to use AI to get things done, especially judging on how many even on HN admit they aren’t good at it.
Writing code on paper is frustrating to the point where, beyond small algorithms, it’s probably not an effective metric (to test performance on real-world tasks). I think even essays may not be as good a metric for writing quality when written vs typed, although the difference is probably smaller. Because e.g. being able to insert a line in the middle of the text, or find-and-replace, are much harder. Also, some people (like me) are especially bad at handwriting: my hand hurts after writing a couple paragraphs, and my handwriting is illegible to most people. While some people are especially bad at typing, they get accommodations like an alternative keyboard or dictation, whereas the accommodation for bad handwriting is…a computer (I was fortunate to get one for exams in the 2010s).
I'm cursed with this as I was put in an international environment right before turning five, went back to my home country to start grade school and only in fifth grade started having English classes.
It's how it was with the internet. I grew up in the 90s, and teacher didn't know how to deal with the fact we no longer had to go through multiple books in the library to get the information they needed. We barely needed to write it.
Now nobody expects students to not use the internet. Same here: teachers must accept that AI can and will write papers and answer questions / do homework. How you test student must be reinvented.
I'm sorry but, lmao. You cannot be serious.
> attribute AI
Oh no!
> still probably just results in kids handwriting AI generated slop
Not if they're doing it in person. And at least they then need to look at it.
I loved computer art and did as many technical art classes at university as I could. At the beginning of the program I was the fastest in the class, because we were given reference art to work from to learn the tools. By the end of the class I couldn't finish assignments because I wasn't creative enough to work from scratch. Ultimately I realized art wasn't my calling, despite some initial success.
Other kids blew me away with the speed of their creations. And how they could detach emotionally from any one piece, to move on to the next.
At some point the will have to make profit, that will shape AI.
Either by higher prices or ads. Both will change the use of AI
The Internet is different. Even with access to websites like Wikipedia, you had to write your own content. Plagiarism was easily detectable.
We shouldn't confuse "we don't have a solution at the moment" with "we should completely abandon no-LLM education". Like with social media, we can always change the direction of progress.
Every detection program I tried said the letter that I personally wrote by hand was 100% AI generated!
So, I looked for humanizer programs and ran my cover letter through a couple. Without the results in front of me at the moment, I can only revert to my judgemental conclusion instead of solid observations...
You need to write like an idiot to pass AI detection algorithms. The rewritten cover letter was awful, unprofessional, and embarrassing.
The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls.
The academic industry need to redefine their purpose. Identify the human abilities that are needed for the future that is filled with AI and devices. Teach that and assess that.
The purpose did change a lot. During Greeks time, purpose was pure knowledge or geometer skills. Industrial revolution and office work changed the purpose of the education to produce clerical staff. With AI, the purpose changes again. You need skills in using the AI and devices.
Memorization has a place, and is a requirement for having a large enough knowledge base that you can start synthesizing from different sources and determining when one source is saying something that is contradicted by what should be common knowledge.
Unless your vision of the future is the humans in WALL-E sitting in chairs while watching screens without ever producing anything, you should care about education.
Exactly. If the calculator knows what to do and how to do, you just need to be able to specify a high level goal, instead of worrying about whether to add or multiply.
I'm fascinated by these claims from some LLM advocates that people will no longer need to know things, think, or express themselves properly. What value then will such individuals bring to the table to justify their pay? Will they be like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest whose sole function was to repeat what the computer says verbatim? Will they be like Tom Smykowski in Office Space indignantly saying "I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that?!" Somebody, please explain.
[EDIT] The other funny aspect about these claims is, given that such an individual's skills are mainly in using an AI, that they can simply be outspent by their peers on AI usage. "Wally got the job instead of me because he paid for a premium LLM to massage his application and I could only afford the basic one because I'm short on money."
They are skillful in shepherding a population of AI agents towards goals.
* grep to remove em dashes and emojis
* re-run through another llm with a prompt to remove excessive sycophantry and invalid url citations
Ha. Every time an AI passionately agrees with me, after I’ve given it criticism, I’m always 10x more skeptical of the quality of the work.
The "humanizer" filters will typically just use an LLM prompted to rewrite the text in another voice (which can be as simple as "you're a person in <profession X> from <region Y> who prefers to write tersely"), or specifically flag the problematic word sequences and ask an LLM to rephrase.
They most certainly don't improve the "correctness" and don't verify references, though.
What AI detectors have largely done is try to formalize that intuition. They do work pretty well on simple adversaries (so basically, the most lazy student), but a more sophisticated user will do first, second, third passes to change the voice.
What I don’t get is why wouldn’t they act like an editor and add their own voice to the writing. The heavy lifting was done now you just have to polish it by hand. Is that too hard to do?
Here is a wiki article with all common tell-tales of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Seriously, highbrow literature is heavily weighted in their training data. (But the rest is Reddit, etc.) This really explains a lot, I think.
There are no clear signs, at least for anyone who cares to hide them