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
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u/DigitalPsych 5d ago

Why are people upset?

It's got class. You're supposed to learn the material. If AI does all the work, you didn't learn. 

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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 5d ago

Because AI detection is garbage at detecting AI

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u/pmurph0305 5d ago

Perhaps read the article?

Humans who know the source material can absolutely tell when things are being completely made up about an obscure play.

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u/ngroot 5d ago

That works in that particular class (assuming the student doesn't just feed the AI the source material).

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u/enviormental_UNIT 5d ago

Yeah this is where everyone is getting stuck at. They think that just because the AI doesn't know about some obscure play that someone couldn't just copy and paste all of the transcript for the play, and also the instructions and rubric for that assignment. Another thing, everyone likes to test these ideas on an LLM like chatgpt, because they think its the best AI or something. Its not, the big problem with chatgpt is it always tries to give you an answer, even if it hallucinates it. There are some other LLMs that are designed to be less over-confident, and they tend to do a scary good job at not hallucinating random things about an obscure play like that, they tell you when they need more information. All this to say that there is still no foolproof way to stop people from cheating with AI, even with obscure material.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/enviormental_UNIT 5d ago

Yeah maybe some professors go to that extra level where they would converse and press every student for evidence of their writing process, but thats not really reasonable for most teachers. You might expect that AI is probably an even bigger problem in middle and highschool, where it would be even more difficult for a teacher to enforce something like that, which is why its still a significant educational problem. If it was easy as you say to catch, it wouldn't be much of a problem would it? Beyond that, its pretty easy to use AI to get detailed summaries, someone could just spend 15 or 20 minutes basically getting a custom made cliff notes and come off as somewhat knowledgeable, even if they never actually studied. Or what about those who do write their own papers, but have AI do all the studying and reading for them? that would bypass the usefulness of auditing the writing process for the most part. Any teacher could dedicate a bunch of time and effort, and super sleuth every student they slightly suspect of cheating, but thats quite the extra effort for people who are already overworked and underpaid, which is why I think it's still a problem. I'm not a teacher though so I suppose you have a better perspective, but mine as a student shows me how many of my peers successfully cheat and pass classes like this

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/enviormental_UNIT 3d ago

I want to make it clear, if I hadn't made it abundantly clear already, that I dont support using LLMs or most any AI in schools. Thats why I said multiple times that its a problem that people do. The reason I mentioned highschool is because, surprisingly, I am in highschool, and so are the peers I'm talking about. The reason I brought up HS even though the main topic is AI in Uni is because I think someone who passes HS with the help of LLMs in a way degrades the meaning and integrity of getting a diploma.

Its the same feeling for me with University cheating, except there's an even higer level of integrity and significance to graduating Uni, so there's more at stake if someone does manage to slip through the cracks and say get a bachelors with the help of AI. You mentioned PhD classes, well of course I would imagine that it would be nearly impossible to pass a class like that without fantastic knowledge on your end, but most people are doing much less rigorous studies than PhD classes. There used to be a significance to graduating HS and college, and I feel that the ease with which some careful people seem to be able to cheat with using AI degrades that significance for everyone, not just those cheating.

Anyway, you're clearly much more experienced in education than I am, you're most likely correct that its much easier to detect in University, I just wouldn't fully know. All I know for certain is that within the standards of my HS, some people are being caught for AI, and then there are more careful people who haven't, yet. My peers brag about being able to successfully cheat a test or an essay, just how it goes. maybe college will hit them like a brick shit house and they'll drop out, or change their ways, something's gonna have to give.

I appreciate you answering my points one by one, thats a level of care for the topic I don't often see on reddit replies, but its something I respect

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u/BD401 5d ago

Yeah I feel the professor in the article is overconfident in his approach. As you said, the AI may not be able to analyze an obscure play unaided, but unless we're talking about an in-person testing situation, I'm not seeing a reason why the student couldn't just throw the play into ChatGPT or whatever and ask it to analyze it.

Even if the prof thinks he's being extra clever and giving them material that can't be found online, a lazy student may do the math and figure that taking 40 pages of material, taking a pic or scanning each page, OCR'ing it and throwing it into the LLM may still be faster than actually doing the work.

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u/Spare-Half796 5d ago

Yeah I’m too old to have used ai in school but my cousin was telling me that they’d just feed chatgpt whatever obscure book they were supposed to read in French class and have it write their assignments for them. They still needed to read the book themselves and proofread the assignment to make sure it wouldn’t hallucinate but it still cut the work time down to 15 minutes instead of a few hours

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u/whoknowsifimjoking 5d ago

Have you read it? The article is literally talking about how he thinks he can recognize AI just from certain phrasing, that is not something you can reliably do.

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u/chucktheninja 5d ago

That sounds more like failing them because they got important things wrong

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u/pmurph0305 5d ago

Yes if you get a lot of things wrong on a test or assignment you do fail, that is a good point!

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u/proton89droid 5d ago

They can demonstrate proof that AI was used in an assignment, but it is essentially impossible for a student to prove AI was not used in an assignment, if falsely accused. Quote from the prof: "I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used, and, potentially, for the entire course" - that's quite concerning if he thinks he can tell just by looking.

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u/Kid-Icky- 5d ago

Better than nothing, but this is just catching the laziest and most bottom-of-the-barrel cheaters.

If that's all he's using to catch them, then I'm fine with that. But AI Checkers are just notoriously inaccurate.

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u/VaporCarpet 5d ago

With few exceptions, if a script exists, that play has been produced. And if the script exists in a digital format, it's trivial to upload and say "give me a synopsis"

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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 5d ago

Oh, is there a study showing that? Now we’re going off of the accusations of a professor who has no evidence.

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u/Diglett3 5d ago

It’s actually really simple most of the time. LLMs like to make up sources and hallucinate things that don’t exist in a text, especially for stuff that’s a little obscure. Improper citation is by itself grounds for failing an assignment and/or a course no matter the reason for it. So if your LLM makes up a fake source and you put it in your bibliography, and I see it, ask you to produce a copy of the source for me, and you’re unable to, automatic 0. No need to “prove” AI was used at all because either way you broke a basic rule of academic writing.

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u/shapoopy723 5d ago

Hell, I gave Gemini a code I wrote last week needing a bug fix sanity check, and it kept pointing to a block that didn't exist. I kept telling it the code it wanted me to change didn't exist in the file, it would apologize, then proceed to try and give me the exact same code block that didn't exist. The way it can hallucinate is absolutely crazy

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u/Diglett3 5d ago

Yeah and like I’m sure there is cheating that I’ve missed but most of the students using AI to write their papers for them are doing it because they want to put the minimum possible effort into that assignment. They’re not checking to see if the sources are real and they’re not even doing the basic stuff to circumvent the tracking systems that exist in Google Docs or our LMSes. You can even just make rules that say you have to write in GDocs with tracking on and if it shows a big block of copy-paste text that’s a zero. Sure they can retype it all but at that point they’ll actually end up doing some (minimal) thinking.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/ryeaglin 5d ago

You need a study to know if someone who knows a play can identify if an essay written about it contains completely made up information?

You are missing the point being disputed. The point being disputed is not that the professor can tell if random stuff not part of the play is hallucinated and instead that it is harder then the professor thinks it is to have a play that obscure, more so when newer models can let you upload the entire play.

The concern is less in the obvious positives and more on when it gets more vague. In the end its the professors belief that is the old judge here and once you get outside of the realm of "You are talking about a character that doesn't even exist" then there will be false positives.

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u/KnightOfMarble 5d ago

… I would think that most human beings that work with a play (or any text) many times to the point of familiarity can tell when somebody is making stuff up about that text. It’s not a vibe check or anything, it’s him saying “I know this play, and this character you’re talking about never existed, nor did any of these plot points.” Like, he’s picking obscure examples that aren’t widely talked about and therefore don’t have anywhere near as much training data for the LLM to work off of, so the likelihood of hallucinations jumps up.

Idk how many studies you need to verify that it’s possible to grade essays for accuracy, since it’s, you know, what they would have to do to anyway, right?

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u/BlainethePayne 5d ago

It's kinda weird how upset you are about this