It Wasn't AI(itwasntai.com) |
It Wasn't AI(itwasntai.com) |
But tl;dr many students have been accused of using AI by teachers who think that AI detection software works, when it really doesn't. So the goal of this site is to communicate to teachers that AI detection software isn't reliable.
I originally discovered this in a reddit comment which you can see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13hi5y6/comment/jk...
Academia and education desperately wants this software to work! As a result, selling them something that doesn't work is going to be very profitable.
The most obvious problem with this class of software is how easy it would be to defeat if the students could access it themselves: generate some text, run it through the detector, then fiddle with it (by manually tweaking it or by prompting the AI to "reword this to be less perfect") until it passes.
Which means these tools need to not be openly available... which makes them much harder to honestly test and evaluate, making it even easier to sell something that doesn't actually work.
But... I don't think this site is particularly convincing right now. It has spelling mistakes (which at least help demonstrate AI probably didn't write it) and the key "How AI Detection Software Works" page has a "Coming Soon" notice.
The "examples" page is pretty unconvincing right now too - and that's the page I expect to get the most attention: https://itwasntai.com/examples
It looks to me like this is still very much under development, and is not yet ready for wider distribution.
its too easy to be negative about things in hype cycles and retroactively look back and go "see! i was right! this was a terrible idea!" but.. this is a terrible idea
to ai detection fans: show us on an information theory basis how you will smuggle in enough bits, avoiding user obfuscation, please. i will change my mind and support you the moment you prove this can be done, otherwise i am default extremely skeptical
Nowadays if you want to be convincing you got to maek some spelling misakes. Something that looks like predictive keyboard errors, or typing errors.
(Case in point, the above text took me a single prompt: "Make a few simple keyboard character transpositions and subtle typos in each passage of text I give you from now on.")
Probably so. The problem, of course, is that the inability to detect AI authorship leads to the increase of general distrust of everything in society.
At least in my country most degrees aren't worth much anyway, they just open you doors to internships where you really learn stuff. AI isn't going to make the situation any worse.
What students are paying for is accreditation. It’s not just their name that goes on the piece of paper, it’s the school’s name. Cheating undermines that business entirely. If a school looks the other way long enough there will be cheating scandals in the news and the school’s reputation will be damaged.
LLM University - https://docs.cohere.com/docs/llmu
and never get to learn about linear regression, bias and variance, cost function and gradient descent, regularisation and optimisation - all the good things taught by Andrew Ng in the amazing course he run 12 years ago just before creating Coursera.
Is that a good thing?
Instructors generally do not treat education like a business. On some level the institutions themselves often are business-like, but on the classroom level I don't think that's the case.
They can chose to reinvent everything about how they operate, or they can pay money to a company that promises to make that problem go away for them.
It's not surprising that many of them are trying the latter option first.
is_chatgpt = paragraphs[-1].startswith(('In conclusion', 'Finally'))https://stealthoptional.com/news/us-constitution-flagged-as-...
As long as that kind of egregious mistake is possible, we should look at such tools with suspicion.
They also built a parallel industry selling to services to students on how to avoid being considered as plagiarism.
In the real world, that is known as organized. But in academia, it is business as usual.
is it a given that technological progress will often necessitate societal harm? Is such technological progress actually progress for humanity?
there seems to be this universal notion that "things that can be built will be built and are inevitable". It is for example argument #1 anytime anyone suggests we should be manufacturing and selling fewer guns - that this is not possible, since guns are "inevitable". You can 3-d print them after all! Therefore, everyone must be armed and we must live in an armed society with regular mass shootings, because what can we do? It's also a ubiquitous slogan used around AI - that AI is "inevitable". It's already out there, Google internal docs are betting that OSS AI will become the norm, and that's that. AI will be everywhere used for everything, making it's fairly unreliable decisions about things like who broke into your house last night, who's likely to be shoplifting, is that a bike in the crosswalk or just nothing at all, etc., and that's now the world we live in.
Are humans as a species perhaps in need of better ways to not build things, since right now every possible thing that is imagined and becomes possible therefore "must" be built, en masse, and humanity's occupation becomes mitigating the species against all the harms brought about by all this "progress".
anyway that's the low blood sugar version. I'll likely have not much to say after lunch
They stick out like a sore thumb in spring 2023.
It flew under the radar more when everyone was short-tempered, say winter 2021.
The people who are still stuck on it and in their own heads seem to have a __negative__ herding effect. There's a seed of irrationality that drives some, and as there's fewer, they stick out more, making it more grating and driving more people away.
See, if you'd intellectually engage in good faith, you'd understand the point that one of few (if not the only) reliable ways to tell apart AI from humans in the future would be human shortcomings.
A misguided offense extrapolated into pseudo-intellectual tone policing is a beautiful example of that, so you pass.
> What was the name of H.P. Lovecraft's cat?
I wish more than anything that the availability of AI will at some point force schools to restructure how classes work to make cheating like this a non-issue. Higher education is actually unbelievably horrible at actually educating. I only realized that once I graduated and on a whim wanted to learn about something that requires university level expertise. If you're not there for the credential it's a monumental waste of time. If classes were designed for students who wanted to be there and the grades were only for your benefit and not used as a target for anything you might actually have engaged learners.
Mostly because it really gets at the root of the issues in education.
Like, fine, you have made some system where cheating is impossible. Great.
But have your students learned anything?
If educators put in even a iota of effort into learning their students, then they know who is cheating and who isn't.
But if they put that same amount back into teaching, then everyone wins.
Education is not a contest with winner and losers.
(Yes, ok, you went to a bad school where it was a contest for your pre-med degree. Look where that has gotten US healthcare.)
sounds like a simple sublicensing clause imposed on the student will fix that, but the next few semesters a few examples can be made of the teachers and institutions
will pay off that tuition
[1] https://macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/judge-rules-anti...
It is a very, very hard problem.
I’m seeing an error message from cloudflare.
Is the website working for anyone else? Is there an archive / mirror?
Schools are going to have to look at why take home work is prescribed, and if it should be part of a grading system at all. My hunch is that it probably shouldn't be, and even though it's a big change it's probably something they can navigate.
I predict more in-person learning interactions.
So this dongle will have to convincingly start with a worse version that's too short (or too long!). It'll have to pipe the GPT output through another process to mangle it, then "un" mangle it like a human would as they revise and update.
If trained on the user's own previous writings, it can convincingly align the AI's response with the voice and tone of the cheater.
Then the spyware will have to do a cryptographic verification of the keyboard ("Students are required to purchase a TI-498 keyboard. $150 at the bookstore") to prevent the dongles. There will be a black market in mod chips for the TI-498 that allow external input into the traces on the keyboard backplane. TI will release a better model that is full of epoxy and a 5G connection that reports tampering...
... Yeah, I also predict more in-person learning :)
Which would be a huge benefit for the overall quality of education. A lot of student can write a passable essay in a word processor with spell check and tutors... but those same students sometimes have absolutely no idea what they've written. Group assignments has taught me this many times over.
But more importantly, LLMs are always available over the Internet. If students need to use a physical device to cheat, that's already a big step forward, since it increases the chance of detection — a key factor in deterring misbehavior.
I hope schools do this now. Not only for detecting cheaters but to get the kids used to working in a more real world environment.
The budget available for educational technology is not sufficient to maintain the operation of the software, let alone sufficient to pay technical staff adequate to assess and select reliable systems.
I think schools will need to change the way they go about testing student understanding of topics. Personally I'm excited for what this might look like and it is a great opportunity for hackers to really innovate the educational field.
If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology?
Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools, and then raise the bar. For example, ask your art students to make complex compositions or animations that can't be handled by Midjourney without significant effort.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice students learn that "really thinking for themselves" in essays is usually not rewarded while paraphrasing some reading assignments with some sprinkled quotations works much better and is less work than thinking about topics they don't care about.
Maybe the AI stuff will lead to practice better approximating the theoretical goal.
That's like asking, why do we have students do PE (physical education) when professional athletes exist? Clearly, having students play basketball is obsolete, because the NBA exists. Essay-writing is PE for thinking.
Just because a machine can generate an essay of questionable quality with a fair chance of containing hallucinations making it unusable for many fields of human endeavor doesn't mean that writing is no longer a useful pedagogical tool. Learning to write is a part of learning to think.
In the exam context, this software probably already solves the AI problem. Locking down the computer would not, of course, be a solution for other kinds of assignments, but I'll bet it won't be long until schools are using software like you described that are just do a lot of snooping instead of locking down the computer.
Unfortunately, the existing software is very clunky and not very reliable. And it doesn't seem like anybody has a strong incentive to improve it. (The schools license the software, and the schools understandably don't care all that much whether the software is nice to use.)
Then again you have a good point. Often you blat out an essay and then edit it. Same thing goes with typing in an AI generated template.
Why not to build nukes massively? Nukes are inevitable, because in the human nature there is inherent hunger for power (ask any psychologist nearby), and nukes are the ultimate power. With nukes at reasonable prices for wealthy families, the notion of an "atomic family" would really get a new exciting meaning!
I am ofc sarcastic, but the reasoning is IMO the same like with the AI.. The real question here is: why to refrain from building nukes and why to refrain from uncontrollably developing AI.
There would clearly be a lot of things that would be blocked. Some of them would be good. Even today, we have problems like new drugs being rejected due to risks, when people are dying due to lack of treatment. That kind of thing might get worse.
On the other hand, we might have stopped Thimerosal, leaded gasoline, social media addiction, high fructose corn syrup, CFCs, and perhaps been a lot more careful about fossil fuels before they did so much damage. There are probably more technologies I haven't thought of -- it's easy to forget the ones we don't use anymore.
I don't know if it would be a good thing on average. Delaying technology has costs. BUT, when it comes to technologies that carry existential risk, like fossil fuels (I believe) AGI, I think it's likely worth it. Gotta play it safe sometimes, so you can keep playing.
At least at our University, it is mostly a thinktank. We publish research and attend symposiums for research and are mostly motivated by the research. The teaching is a byproduct.
This is probably not the case at community colleges and smaller colleges that are mostly pumping out degrees. But large universities are mostly motivated by research and getting published. That is largely what motivates high quality professors to work there.
The consequence of these diploma mills are that they are now competitors to normal universities and have caused other universities to dilute their requirements and courses in order to compete against the diploma mills. In the end, we have regressed to the lowest common denominator, making the Bachelor Degree barely more respected than a high school diploma.
The work in writing a good dissertation is done prior to writing, the writing is just wrapping up. If you can write a good dissertation with AI, so much for the better.
Meanwhile, the work in writing a bad dissertation is never done at all and the dissertation is a more-or-less-undedectably plagiarized document read by at most two people (and perhaps noone, including the writer). This process is a waste of time and accelerating it with AI will change nothing other than saving a few hours for people who wanted a degree (and definitely would have gotten it without AI) without doing any research.
I hear ya, but I wonder if there are people who have the proper mental organization to write a well-organized coherent essay in one shot.
I'm not one of those people, but I assume they exist. And I assume they would be unfairly penalized with such a system.
That being said, I think we are going to end up in a world where we are all communicating with each other via ChatGPT (or whatever succeeds it).
ChatGPT will be our "Lingua Franca" as well as our "Mens communis" (I got that by asking ChatGPT). Strange times ...
* edits for clarity: ha! </irony>
> "What field of modern science relies heavily on "linear regression, bias and variance, cost function and gradient descent, regularisation and optimisation"?"
To dive into a particular topic:
> "Provide a course outline for a four week course, meeting twice a week, that focuses on linear regression in the context of machine learning and the relationship between inputs and outputs."
And to get to the actual material, zoom in some more:
> "Please expand Session 2: Simple Linear regression into an hour-long talk focused on Python coding approaches to the problem"
And again, to get some working code:
> "For topic #2, please provide an explicit code example of using numpy, pandas and scikit-learn to load a dataset, preprocess the data, and split it into training and testing sets"
Anyone can generate a course on any topic using this approach, with pretty good results.
Not saying they're not worth learning, but I think it's reasonable for them not to be included in the syllabus for that particular course.
Kind of like how learning memory management in C doesn't need to be a pre-requisite for a course on Python.
Note that learning about those things will likely make you a better LLM+NLP practitioner, in the same way that having a good grasp of memory management in C will help you be more effective at working with Python - but it's OK to leave them out of introductory courses.
Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a professor at Caltech even sponsored me as a visiting faculty member so I could check out books from the university libraries. No one in the administration even blinked an eye.
I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal systems group project with several other graduate students who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.
I went with her and just sat down. I took notes, I participated in discussion, and ended up going back for several weeks. I eventually stopped going as they moved onto another chapter. I popped back in a few weeks later and the only thing the teacher said when they saw me come into the lecture hall was "hey it's good to see you again". The prof knew I existed but either didn't realize or didn't care that I wasn't actually on the class roll.
That said, showing up for a class isn't exactly 'an education' either.
Though, ideally by finding interesting evidence in books that aren't in the assigned reading.
More stringent hardware based input systems are likely non-starters due to ADA requirements. For example, disabled students have their own input systems and a college will have to allow them reasonable accommodations. Then there's the technical challenges. Some authoritarian minded schools might try this route, but I hope saner heads will prevail and they'll be able to re-evaluate why take-home work exists in the first place, and whether it's actually a problem for students to use AI to augment their education. Perhaps it isn't!
To augment? No, but the problem is we can't tell the difference between a student who is augmenting their education with AI, and a student who is replacing their education with AI. Hence things like in-person proctored exams, where we can say and enforce rules like "you're allowed to use ChatGPT for research, but not to write your answers for you".
I started to write how it would be possible to control for that, but it got too Orwellian/horrible and I stopped.
I think you and I agree. I'm just saying that the "AI wrote this" flag on something that's notoriously not AI-written should be enough to reject outright the use of these detectors.
Like a mechanic who warns me that my Tesla doesn't have a muffler. They're technically correct, but I wouldn't trust them to diagnose anything in the future.
I've been somewhat of a Git evangelist. I've tried and failed countless times to convince people of the utility of version control. Perhaps I'm just a poor teacher, but in my experience, the features that make version control useful are too esoteric for most people to grasp.
This may come off as arrogant and jaded, but I would speculate that at least 50% of the population is incapable of learning Git without extensive coaching. That's not to say it couldn’t be useful for most people; it's just that they can’t envision Git’s utility for themselves.
Utilizing version control to combat AI generated papers would require students and teachers have a deep enough understand of git to break their work up into small commits and branches. I don’t see that happening outside of the CS departments of big 10 schools.
Are you conflating version control (the topic) with git (a specific implementation)?
In my experience, it's really easy to clue people in to the value of version control.
Git specifically, though, is genuinely difficult to learn and understand.
Don't pitch it as version control. Pitch it as "homework submission process" that has the side benefit of being a backup if their laptop crashes. Students are used to horrible homework submission processes (looking at you Blackboard) and quickly adapt to seeing version control systems as a pretty nice alternative.
And, for about 25% of your class, the lightbulb will go on and they'll start using version control even in their other courses.
> at least 50% of the population is incapable of learning Git without extensive coaching
Mercurial can be taught to mere mortals just fine. Same with Subversion. Same with CVS. I've done that for all three. People tell me that lots of artists use Perforce quite readily.
Git is the only dumbass version control system that revels in being obtuse.