Notes on “ai” cheating
Last spring, i spoke with a writing professor at a school in Florida who had grown so demoralized by students’ cheating that he was ready to give up and take a job in tech. “It’s just about crushed me,” he told me at the time. “I fell in love with teaching, and I have loved my time in the classroom, but with ChatGPT, everything feels pointless.” When I checked in again this month, he told me he had sent out lots of résumés, with no success. As for his teaching job, matters have only gotten worse. He said that he’s lost trust in his students. Generative AI has “pretty much ruined the integrity of online classes,” which are increasingly common as schools such as ASU attempt to scale up access. No matter how small the assignments, many students will complete them using ChatGPT. “Students would submit ChatGPT responses even to prompts like ‘Introduce yourself to the class in 500 words or fewer,’” he said.
If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI-cheating-and-detection arms race plays out in the background. Technologists have been trying out new ways to curb the problem; the Wall Street Journal article describes one of several frameworks. OpenAI is experimenting with a method to hide a digital watermark in its output, which could be spotted later on and used to show that a given text was created by AI. But watermarks can be tampered with, and any detector built to look for them can check only for those created by a specific AI system. That might explain why OpenAI hasn’t chosen to release its watermarking feature—doing so would just push its customers to watermark-free services.
History rhymes but sometimes it just plain repeats. Keeping technology from students while they are learning is completely absurd. Labeling it cheating is the worst way to do that.
