Anyone have any recommended tools to use to detect AI generated student essays

[gallopingissuchfun]

Sick of reading assignments that are clearly styled by AI and at odds with students’ previous critical abilities. University’s TurnitIn software doesn’t detect AI text. What tools are out there to prove it was AI generated?

I’m in a RG ranked pretty highly and (was) a believer in essays as critically important in practicing the long form argument.

No, of course students are not going to write an ‘essay’ at work once they’re done with uni. Essays are not about writing, they are about thinking. Thinking on a topic, offering an argument, explaining it, and justifying it with reliable evidence. Arguing at length is difficult, but really develops a students thinking and learning. Making a justified argument at work is an important skill.

However, sadly I’m coming to accept that the essay is dead. And critical thinking skills, dependent on domain knowledge, will be eroded. Except for students at Oxford and Cambridge who will still write and defend weekly essays in small tutorials. The divide is going to grow.

This year we have gone to great lengths to teach them how to do an annotated bibliography, how to research a topic, what an argument looks like etc in order to teach students how to use it so they aren't made stupid by it.

Pretty much all of them (hundreds) use it stupidly despite everything we painstakingly taught them. It does not just write for them. It thinks for them. Much of the thinking is describing a laundry list, rather than critical analysis, and ends on an upbeat, positive, corporatist bs. And I’d love a student to read a full article to check their understanding, not to ask for summaries first, and not use GenAI for constructing an argument. They just don’t.

Humans love it when technology makes our life easier. Atm, GenAI makes students lives hugely easier so of course they’re going to use it. Tim Wu titled his book, The Tyranny of Convenience and his argument holds for me. No idea what the answer is, but I’m glad I’m near the end of my career.

Never used it to produce slides but I have asked it to produce activities and even then I've just taken the idea and reconfigured it.
I've gone for a presentation to assess one of my modules. There's a limit to what AI can do with a presentation. There's little we can do if they've used it to prepare the presentation but they can rarely answer any questions if they don't understand the subject. However, I do have one student who is allowed to pre-record because of anxiety.

Our students are complaining about faculty using it to create slides and complaining about faculty using it for marking. The irony.

It is social media on steroids to the nth degree. Arriving on everyone’s radar just as people have woken up to the harms generated by sm and are trying to discourage young people from accessing it.

Look at the men developing and promoting GenAI. Do you trust any of them? Do any of them have moral principles, ethical standards, good intentions? No.

What needs more sunlight and discussion is on the capacity for detailed data mining it poses, the surveillance GenAI allows, and the potential for dictating what (people) students think. Even now, most students reproduce what they’ve been told, not having been taught from a young age to question.

I certainly fear for our students futures and fear for a future society organised around use of and reliance on GenAI.

www.newcartographies.com/p/the-myth-of-automated-learning

PP mentioned AI in the workplace. Its replacing lots of graphic designers in my area, but its a copyright infringement nightmare and many of our recent grads with an arts background have no clue of the value of original work in order to protect us from being sued. And then there is the nightmare of AI CVs and cover letters, all these wonderful articulate and talented young people, who weirdly can't string a sentence together at interview.

Feels like - what lack of exercise has done to the physical body - AI will do to our minds. Most of us have to plan and go out of our way to get anything approaching what would once have been a normal amount of physical exercise - it's use it or lose it.

My students like to feed their lecture notes into chat and get summaries. In the past, you'd expect the students' notes to have more depth than the handouts - now these summaries have less. Everything is just so .... slick but shallow.

Surely when it comes to finals the students that have used AI throughout the course come undone?

And then you get in trouble because the fail rate for your module is too high...

So what's the point of exams that everyone can pass but passing the exam doesn't demonstrate anything worthwhile?

Not ever course has finals/exams. Mine doesn’t. We may need to move to more exam focused assessments but will need to get the whole programme re validated if we change assessments (professional registration).