College student put on academic probation for using Grammarly: ‘AI violation’::Marley Stevens, a junior at the University of North Georgia, says she was wrongly accused of cheating.
You may not agree with the policy or the tools used, but the rules were clear, and at this point she has no evidence that she did not use some other Generative AI tool. It’s just her word against another AI that is trained to detect generated material.
What is telling is her reaction to all of this, literally making a national news story because she was flagged as a cheater. I promise if she wasn’t white or attractive NY Post wouldn’t do anything. What a massive self own. Long after she leaves school this story will be the top hit on a google search of her name and she will out herself as a cheater.
You may not agree with the policy or the tools used, but the rules were clear,
OK, if you’ll be consistent and agree that using Taro cards to determine who’s cheating is normal, if rules say that.
and at this point she has no evidence that she did not use some other Generative AI tool
Your upbringing lacks in some key regards.
It’s just her word against another AI that is trained to detect generated material.
There are (or should be) allowances for the degree of precision where any tool can be trusted. If it is wrong in 1% of cases - then its use is unacceptable. In 0.1% - acceptable only if she doesn’t argue it. In 0.01% something - acceptable with some other good evidence.
I’ll help you become a bit less of an ape and inform you that an “AI” (or anything based on machine learning) can’t be used as a sole detector of anything at all.
What clear rule did she violate though? Like, Grammerly isn’t an AI tool. It’s a glorified spell check. And several of her previous professors had recommended it’s use.
What she did “wrong” was write something that TurnItIn decided to flag as AI generated, which it’s incredibly far from 100% accurate at.
Like, what should she have done differently?
i don’t believe she cheated, but i also don’t care.
i do think being a conventionally attractive blonde did help her get coverage.
i also want turn it in to die in a fire.
i’m very conflicted about your comment, but i’m not conflicted about this situation at all: stop using turn it in, and put the girl back in school.
I can make an offline AI say absolutely anything in any way shape or form I would like. It is a tool that improves efficiency in those smart enough to use it. There is nothing about it that is different than what a human can write.
This is as stupid as all of the teachers that used to prevent us from using calculators for math 20 years ago. We should be encouraging everyone to adapt and adopt new technology that improves efficiency, and take on the real task of testing students with intelligent adaptive techniques. It is the antiquated mindset and academia that is the problem. Anyone that can’t adapt should be removed. When the student enters the workforce, their use of such efficiency improving tools is critical.
Writing a paper isn’t about efficiency, it’s about forcing you to synthesize concepts and ideas such that they become more concrete in your mind. It, in itself, is the learning tool. It isn’t something to be checked off and chruned through like a widget you make at a factory.
Your comment just sounds like you lack, I don’t know, care in regards to learning.
You need to sit down with an offline LLM and learn what they can actually do. It is not good at doing the work for you. It is excellent at helping you explore yourself in countless ways you can never access on your own. It can answer all of the questions you don’t quite understand as you try and navigate a new subject. It is easily able to amplify and accelerate the learning process. It can be abused like anything, but there is nothing new about that.
The articles and framing of AI as something bad is all coming from manipulation of the media by Altman and company. It is about trying to control the next tech monopoly that will dominate the next decade. It is already too late for that though. Open Source offline AI will beat what Open AI has tried to control. Yann LeCunn is the person to watch in this space. He is a Bell Labs alumni pushing open source AI as the head of Meta AI. If you know anything about the current digital age, that combination of someone from the old Bell Labs pushing open source to lead an industry without trying to monopolize it should mean a great deal.
AI is not really super capable like some kind of AGI. It is like Stack Overflow or old forum threads level helpful with complex tasks. It is also a mirror of both the datasets culture and person that creates the prompts. It is only as good as your vocabulary and ability to understand its idiosyncrasies while communicating on a level of openness that humans are not accustomed. This is an evolved tool. It is not AGI. It is not persistent. It can not learn on its own. There are very real limitations with how much information can be processed at once, and limitations for niche information. This is no time to be a Luddite. It is still an order of magnitude less capable than a human but offers access to tailored information on a level that has only been available to the super rich that hire tutors for their children any make major donations to institutions in the real “cheating” of the system you will never be able to object to.
I greatly value learning, so much so, that I jumped at the opportunity to have custom tailored learning the second I had the chance. It ended up being even better than I expected. There are scientific models and several ways to setup a model with your own documents where it can answer questions and cite sources.
You shouldn’t put too much stock in these detection tools. Not only do they not work, they flag non-native English speakers for cheating more than native speakers.
they flag non-native English speakers for cheating more than native speakers.
Yes, and for me as a former it’s absolutely clear why - because I’m doing the same thing as a generative model, imitating text in another language. Maybe with more practice in verbal communication and being more relaxed I could reduce this probability, but the thing is this is not something which should affect school tests at all.
These are people trying to use a specific kind of tools where it’s fundamentally not applicable.
… No proof she didn’t? What could possibly prove that?
Can you give me an example of this proof? And if so, is that something reasonable for a student to have?
Seriously, think it through.
If you write something in Word or an equivalent program, there will be metadata of the save files that shows creation and edit timestamps. If they use something like Google Docs, there’s a very similar mechanism via the version history. I actually had the metadata from a Word document be useful in a legal case.
Ok, and that’s proof of what exactly? That you made the file when you said you did?
Not to mention, you can set those to whatever value you want
I can see how it could be part of a court case, because it’s one more little corroborating detail. It doesn’t prove anything though
My masters program told us to use AI all we wanted but just site the use.
Seems like the same sort of solution as my school had about Wikipedia which is by all means use it but site the sources not cite the content.
Quite a lot of AI will give you sources that you can check when they are referencing stuff, so just check those references to make sure it’s not made things up and then as long as it’s fine cite those websites and articles.
I’ve been at the front of the classroom–using tools like TurnItIn is fine for getting “red flags,” but I’d never rely on just tools to give someone a zero.
First, unless you’re in a class with a hundred people, the professor would have a general idea as to whether you’re putting in effort–are they attentive? Do they ask questions? And an informal talk with the person would likely determine how well they understand the content in the paper. Even for people who can’t articulate well, there are questions you can ask that will give you a good feel for whether they wrote it.
I’ve caught cheaters several times, it’s not that hard. Will a few slide through? Yes, but they will regardless of how many stupid AI tools you use. Give the students the benefit of the doubt and put in some effort, lazy profs.
Same, and discussed with my lecturers.
Especially 1st year business - we use the same text book as the last 10 years (just different versions), where nothing has really changed in the last 30 odd years, using the same template that runs through 600 odd students a year, where nearly every student uses the same easy three references that we used in class.
Its new to you, but no one is going to have an original idea or anything revolutionary in that assessment.
Anyone marking an assignment with a TurnItIn report, who is also in possession of half a brain, knows to read through the report and check where the matches are coming from. A high similarity score can come about for many reasons, and in my experience most of those reasons are not due to cheating.
My sister once got a zero because of a 100% match in the system with her own same work uploaded there a few minutes before. It was resolved, but - not very nice emotions.
I’d have put a complaint in with the department for unprofessional conduct . If they can’t catch something that obvious, they aren’t even trying to run a class properly.
I’ve also been the one on the opposite side of the classroom. I was lab based, so we didn’t use Turn it in.
With a reasonably sized class, you can easily spot which students have worked together because their reports tend to be shockingly similar.
I agree that you get a feel for them with informal conversations and you can see how their submissions tie up with your informal conversations.
I used to tweak the questions year on year. I’ve suspected there is a black market, an assignment exchange, or something because I caught students submitting work from previous years. They were mainly international students that were only there for their masters year.
Something my instructors could never explain to me is what Turnitin does with the content of papers after they’re scanned. How long are they kept? Are they used for verifying anyone else’s work? I didn’t consent to any of that. When someone runs for office 20 years later are they going to leak old papers? Are they selling that data to other AI trainers? That’s some fucking bullshit. It needs to be out of the classroom for more reasons than just false positives.
I remember seeing some fine print when signing agreements for my college that any papers I write are intellectual property of the school. I’m guessing that’s standard nowadays.
Simple solution. Ask the student to talk about their paper. If they know the subject matter, the point of the assignment is meant.
That’s great for some people, but would be absolutely horrible for people like me. I usually know the subject matter, but I tend to have problems gettingy thoughts out of my head. So I’d just end up getting double screwed if I were in this situation.
I had to do a lot of presenting in college, which is more or less the same thing. There were peers who struggled with that, but they always talked with the Professors and I never came across a hard ass that would penalize them for it. Might not even be legal if it’s a medical condition.
I’m reminded of the lecturer who was accused of being an AI when they sent an email.
Getting the triple-whammy of being accused of using an AI when you didn’t, drawing a blank during an oral interview/explanation, and then being penalised like you’d used one anyway, would be hellish.
Yes, which is why I hate job interviews and especially people pretending to be good as interviewers and telling stories how somebody didn’t know something elementary. Well, maybe if it’s elementary, then the applicant did know that, just your questions confuse people, which makes it mostly your fault (that’s not directed to anybody present).
