Submitted 15 hours ago by PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca to [deleted]
How do you reduce score on AI detectors?
My school uses AI detectors when marking papers, and almost any result higher than 0% can cause lost grades. As anyone whose used one of these tools will know, they have an extremely high false positive rate, meaning that while I don’t use AI (and can’t, given the technical nature of the papers) I still lose marks. Is there any way to decrease the rate of false positives without completely destroying the structure and flow of a paper?
Video record you writing your papers by hand with a clear view of your computer screen. Turn in hand written paper.
You do really need to make a stand on this. Personally, I would offer a test or demonstration where you write a paper in a place where you can be assured to not be using an AI, and have them check the false-positive rate to show the vendor they have is bad. Short of that, you’re really talking about pushback on an administration that clearly has only mediocre ideas, and is willing to let students suffer the brunt of their bad decision-making until you make it a problem for them.
Students should have a way to seek real recourse about this. Use it now and use it early to establish a record of receiving false positives, Otherwise you risk some professor later really causing problems with a 5% false positive rate and it being a huge problem for you.
And maybe contact the dean about it.
Also, given the cost of higher education these days, they really should do better
Slop detectors might as well be random number generators, it will never give you 0% because it’s slop in and of itself.
No. There is nothing you can do. AI detection is bullshit and there is no way to game it to reduce how much it determines you to be an AI. Your school is punishing you for it existing, and thus they remove the punishment for those using it.
Sounds like someone should file a lawsuit against the school for using ai ai detectors that don’t work right.
At the least there should be an appeals process, anonymously, where the decision goes to a jury of faculty or something if not settled otherwise.
My experience is the opposite. Even for a work that was 100% obviously written by AI, an AI detector only gave me 30% probability. That specific work was written with a PhD level and had bogus sources, one litteraly having copilot in the name. Coming from a 19 years old first year college student… On every work I presented, the AI evaluated the probability very low while for me (I know the students, I’ve spent 15 weeks with them) l, they obviously didn’t wrote the papers. When I pointed to the model that I was sceptical, I suddenly change the cheating probability to a much higher score. So basically it just tolds you what you want to hear. The college told us they wont consider cheating unless we have proof so we just end up giving good grades to everyone. Two scenarios here, either about 70% of students use some sort of AI to write these days, or we have the smartest generation ever in front of us, with 19 years old kids having the level of their teacher aftef a year in College. University and College administration want to give diplomas, the students want to graduate, and the teachers are now just a tool to get this done.
Universities like Hardvard recently adopted internal rules preventing a class from having more than 40% A or A+ in the final result, because it was getting absurd, with some classes having 80% of the students with an A. I’m seriously considering leaving college teaching because I can’t understand what’s happening.
When I pointed to the model that I was sceptical, it suddenly change the cheating probability to a much higher score.
What did you use? Don’t ask the LLM if something is written by an LLM, it has no way of telling.
i wonder if it eventually comes to having to resort to legal action because of this. Those detectors are unreliable yet you can be penalized based on what they spew. And lost grades is lasting consequence.
Meanwhile the same schools that punish students for using AI (even when they didn’t) are then hiring speakers to cram the “AI is the future, get used to it or get left behind” message down students throats.
its actually quite weird how strongly the ai is being pushed everywhere. Though I guess it just proves how deep the rot goes.
You could use something that automatically keeps track of revision history, like Google Docs. If your writing is flagged by their AI detectors, show them the full history.
There are extensions that will slowly input text and delete words to make it seem human typed.
Good idea!
As someone who teaches CS and grades assignments, the last few years have been really rough. Academic dishonesty has skyrocketed with models becoming smarter and students becoming more dependent on them. Any assignment that’s above average will make me suspicious, and when it appears to be 100% AI generated, the feeling that I spend more time grading than the student spent working on it is awful. Even when I’m almost sure a work is AI generated, unless there are some dumb leftovers such as “As an AI assistant […]”, I can never be 100% sure. This causes me a lot of headaches because the only thing worse than rewarding dishonesty would be not appropriately rewarding an outstanding assignment.
As much as I’d love to have à software tell me with 100% certainty which parts (if any) of an assignment are AI written, AI detectors are all snake oil, no exception. They exploit teachers’ helplessness to make false promises that we really want to believe in.
Moreover, I don’t think fully banning AI use is a sensible thing to do. LLMs are a thing, whether we like them or not, and using them in a sensible way is a useful skill to learn. There’s one big issue though : on one hand, assignments are made so that the problems students have to solve all have well-known solutions. This is required to make sure the assignment is doable in the first place, and that teachers will be able to help. On the other hand, LLMs are disproportionately good at classic assignment problems since there are so many published solutions online (which then end up in training datasets). Moreover, assignements are usually made to guide students through a larger problem by breaking it down into smaller problems, which is basically the perfect prompt for a LLM. This means students can get away with the laziest uses of LLMs (which usually won’t work with real world problems). In the worst cases, the only “skill” some students learn is to throw a PDF at whatever AI they paid for, ask it to solve the assignment, and copy paste the output without thoroughly reading it first.
Teachers clearly need to adapt. There will always be a few students who fail to learn in every class, but when so many students don’t learn, it’s the teacher who is failing to teach.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to explicitly build the assignment around using AI, and grading on editing the result? Kinda like how research papers are graded on properly citing and presenting information that’s not supposed to be original.
If LLMs are going to be a lasting tool, maybe using them effectively is an important skill to teach. Encourage AI use in generating components, but force those components into a structure that AI struggles with, and grade based on how well the AI-generated components fit together in a coherent end product.
I remember when I was studying math in college, the upper level courses regularly gave take-home exams because all the tools and resources in the world weren’t going to help if you didn’t understand the material.
It’s not a great solution, if students are using AI to skirt learning the basics then they aren’t going to develop the skills to understand the work they’re editing. Kinda like calculators; they’re great when you’re being evaluated for more complex tasks where the arithmetic isn’t the important part, but kids still need to learn how to do the arithmetic in the first place before they automate it.
But the genie’s out of the bottle. Fair or not, teachers are going to have to adapt to test the skills that can’t be automated yet. I was around for the tail end of teaching kids how to use the card catalog in the library to do research, but everyone just uses search engines now.
I do not envy teachers right now. They have a Hurculean task before them, and I only see it getting worse as AI gets better.
I’m also a teacher. I teach programming. I teach adults, some even 50+. I love teaching the older students, because they really care, they really want to learn, they put in effort and attention, all of them.
My university primarily teaches online, through Teams. Lessons are not mandatory. Lately it happens a lot that simeone hands in their finals assignment and it looks shiny. I’ve never heard of this student or talked to them. They never handed in any homework or asked any questions. They didn’t even watch the recorded lessons. So I look at the code and it’s all smells of AI.
In this case our process is to fike it with the exam commission and they will have a meeting with the student to prove theyy actually did it themselves. I’ve sit in with a few of these meetings, but I’ve only seen one student be able to answer any of the questions we ask them about their own work.
This works pretty well, because I don’t have to prove AI, I just have to point to suspicion. Than the students have to prove that they know what they have done. Which is a “guilty until proven innocent” kind of sitution, but it’s very easy to pass if you’re actually innocent and did your own work.
I think this is the tried and tested way to test for plagiarism, but now applied to AI usage. Because in fact, AI usage in a graduation project is plagiarism. Time consuming, but effective.
years ago, we were told to make our writing formal and dry. now, the best way to make sure it doesn’t get flagged as false positives is tone and personality of your writing. an AI will never have a joke in a footnote, actual papers sometimes do.
I guess you could make a document history. Make a copy for each day you work on that document. Idk if they are going to accept it as proof though…
This is what Git was built for. It’s not just for software
Write it by hand. Hand it over in person.
This only proves you can write. You can still generate the text using an LLM and write it down with a pen.
I remember not long ago seeing an image of handwritten homework where the student answered “as a large language model …”.
I does create friction for the person who has to enter it into the checker though
AI tends to write correct English, so you could try adding typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect punctuation, wrong capitalization, etc. /joke
People already prompt their AI to do this.
Personally I think trying to detect AI is a lost cause and they need to do something different. Back in my day all tests were in person with no tools except a calculator, but I can see how that won’t scale.
or make them write papers in a computer labs, where there is usually a moniter person that watches people like a hawk.
Unironically have already been doing this. Marks lost from typos are much less than those from AI false positives.
You could ask your tutors what you can do to ease their conscience in regards to AI use. If they don’t have suggested protocols or don’t take that as an indicator of your honesty, they’re just fucking punishing you for nothing
Meatwagon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 minutes ago
Pay for the highest tier plan of Claude and ask it to make it look more like a human wrote it.
Real answer: Your university is being ridiculous. They should be using a digital proctoring service while you guys do your papers if they’re that serious about it. Detectors will never work. We aren’t allowed to make flat accusations of AI use, but a high result would make us look at the paper and see if there were any other irregularities or talk to the student to make sure that can explain the paper. It’s not a free chance to just toss the paper into a cheating bin.