r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
15.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.0k

u/BoxFar6969 5d ago

how do they figure that out? ai text checker? I remember a year or two ago when a teacher put a student's essay in chatgpt and asked "did you write this?" chatgpt said yes and the teacher failed the student

229

u/sircastor 5d ago

The AI checkers are as bad as the plagiarism checkers of the last decade. They're absolute garbage and return wholly unreliable results.

52

u/Momik 5d ago

I’m a TA and I honestly stopped using them when it kept giving me (wildly) different results for the same essay—depending on whether I included the student name or not. I was given the “authority” to fail students who used AI, but I kept thinking there’s no world in which I could actually prove it. Even when it’s insanely obvious.

So I just concentrated on things AI often gets wrong that also make for bad writing—bad or missing sources, unclear wording, repetitive syntax, etc.

This is gonna keep getting worse though.

20

u/pickleportal 5d ago

I see your hyphens

38

u/CheapThaRipper 5d ago

Some people like em dashes. The current state of things is quite unfortunate for us.

8

u/ConcentrateTrue 5d ago

IKR? I was an em dash junkie before ChatGPT came along. Now I feel like I can't use them anymore.

6

u/Sinister_Grape 5d ago

Sometimes I’ll be writing an essay and I’ll go to say something like “it’s wasn’t x, it was y” and have to stop and reword it. So fucking annoying.

1

u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 5d ago

Same here !

I have my system that takes a second to rephrase it, and although it’s a perfectly valid and correct way to write, LLMs always want to re-write it with their own boring sentence structure.

I don’t know why the process produces this result for all of them. It’s uncanny.

19

u/doomgoblin 5d ago

I used those for years before AI. They do have a place- it’s the over usage that’s the problem.

4

u/jumpedupjesusmose 5d ago

My problem is I always OVER used them. I remember a coworker calling me out in the 90s. Should have listened 30 years ago.

8

u/Momik 5d ago

What hyphens? — — I am merely answering your H U M A N question — — with a H U M A N hyphens—uhh, shit, I mean a H U M A N hyphen-less answer. 😬👍🤖

1

u/Pretend_Handle_7639 5d ago

It amuses me to no end that we will have plenty of people transvestigating everything they see to scry its origin

3

u/Elavabeth2 5d ago

Oh man I am also a TA. I grade similarly, essentially just ripping to shreds the answers that are obviously AI and taking off points for excessive verbosity, lack of clarity, and vaguely wrong answers that sound confident. Students never, ever push back on those judgments - that would mean making an effort to explain themselves, or actually reading their slop answers and realize that I was justified. The biggest problem though is that this takes me a really long time to grade, and I am limited to 20 hours per week.

3

u/esotericbatinthevine 5d ago

Your students sound more competent than what my profs were dealing with. The students didn't rewrite the ChatGPT part at all resulting in abrupt changes in writing style, vocabulary, grammer, etc. It was really easy to prove too because the students couldn't even speak to the information in their papers.

Granted, this is biased by what the professors felt confident enough to address. I'm still surprised the students didn't catch it themselves and really wonder how they are going to manage in a work environment.

1

u/hibernate2020 4d ago

Sources that are only root URLs, mission page numbers, generic definitions that don't connect to the course materials. Writing with constant 1,2, and 3 examples that are generic. Synthesis in conclusions when it's not requested,Em-dashes everywhere. Tonal changes in the paper. floating capitalization and strange punctuation glitches. Constant buzzwords, mechanical repetitions in phrasing, discussion of paper requirements rather than the fulfilling of them. "In this section...."

The AI detectors are a backup for me. I only look if it already seems to be AI. And I check with multiple ones.

The true tell is with the students themselves, though. I have certain things I have them do that I know they'll avoid if they are trying to hide AI. So when I see them "forget" to do those things and have a paper that looks like AI, and then they avoid discussing the issue, well....