AI chatbot doing kids' homework for them - undetectable

[noblegiraffe]

The robot apocalypse is upon us - an AI can now produce essays that cannot be picked up by plagiarism software. The Telegraph is breathlessly reporting that teachers are begging the government to solve the problem.

I've been playing around with the AI, and it is, indeed, impressive. It can produce perfectly reasonable essays in response to exam questions, in whatever style that you request; and not just essays, it can answer maths and science questions (and indeed any subject) with step by step explanations

Should teachers be worried? Probably. My DS reports that he has already heard of kids using it to do their homework.

How can we combat this?

Well, for English and humanities teachers, I would advise that you make an account and chat with the AI yourself. Feed it questions, see what it comes up with. It does come up with different answers each time you ask, but with strong similarities. If you feed your essay question in enough times, in enough ways, you should be able to spot AI generated answers.

The other solution is to only bother marking work that the students have produced in class, in test conditions - this is a policy I've had as a maths teacher for years. As a correct answer is a correct answer, who knows if it was produced by the pupil, their tutor, their parents, or the kid they hang out with at break time?

Parents: Try to encourage your kids not to cheat as in the end the AI can't sit their exams for them.

The software won't be free forever. But who knows what is coming next?

chat.openai.com/chat

I'm going to be using this in class with my sixth formers next week to get it to write sample essays on particular questions and then we pull them apart and see if they're any good and then adapt to make them our own.

As an A-Level MFL teacher and given the preponderance of Google, Deepl and Linguee, I gave up some time ago setting essays for and instead essays get written in class, closed book and under timed conditions. It truly remarkable how different these can be to whatever guff is produced for 'homework' these days.

But it's useful to let the students know that you know these things exist, as then they're less likely to pull a fast one on you.

Presumably it can write an essay in, say, German as fluently as it can write one in English.

What sort of essay questions do they have to answer?

In maths kids can use Wolfram Alpha to give step by step answers to questions, and my niece was telling me her classmates all use some app where you take a photo of a maths question and it gives you the answer.

It will do starting thread posts for forums including MN.

Yep @noblegiraffe it's works just as well in other languages too. I've been fiddling around with a French and German these holidays to see what it can cope with and it's admirably (and frustratingly) good. It also make pretty good worksheets for a range of tasks in various languages. I even tested it by asking it to produce a worksheet for KS3 English native speakers learning how to tell the time in Mandarin (notoriously tricky) and it's really quite good, both in term of the language plus the pedagogical scaffolding etc of the worksheet. So I've decided to embrace it as a learning tool rather than try to resist it. At least at KS5 I can force switch it off in lesson with timed exam conditions and take the line with my students of "well that's lovely dear but can YOU do that in the exam"

@noblegiraffe Students have to write analytical essays in target language on a set film and novel in French/German/Spanish, a bit like the kind of essays they do for English Lit. We usually end up doing the same titles that real actual Abitur or Bacclauréat students do in Germany or France which is quite cool.

BTECs are mostly or exclusively coursework depending on the level, and while I could tell if something obviously doesn't match the student's vocabulary, this sounds more sneaky. I shall have to investigate! As a PP said, I might use it in class to generate "exemplar" answers and then we'll pull it apart and rebuild.

@Piggywaspushed Good American schools expect quotes and analysis. In university, I was offered decent money to write essays for others. I didn’t do it because I am honorable, and I couldn’t write a paper bad enough that the student wouldn’t be caught.

Yes, I do know that : don't worry wasn't having a pop! It's just the results I got did read more like an American High School grade paper than the specifics of an English GCSE. There are differences and not sure the AI knows this.

EduTwitter hugely excited this morning about ChatGPT's ability to write lesson plans. Good. Maybe this will put a stop to the awful industry of selling lesson plans and the annoying people on SM who ask for other people's schemes of work!

My ds is a computer science student.

He's known about this for ages!

I agree it's a problem. I'm lucky he's too honest to actually use his knowledge and cheat!

Although Ai website also has its uses.

One of the students put "help - my mum beats me" in the AI software when they were doing a lesson on it and they got a call from the police (you have tonight a phone job in).

Not funny but they found it really funny he's got caught being a twat!

The exercise in class that day was something g like trying to confuse the AI.

I'm amazed it's free tbh. Is that just temporary whilst they are ironing out glitches/ polishing the product?
Also I think the potential for blackmail should put people off?

I have adhd - unfort developing a 2000 word essay overnight is a common adhd trait as we leave things to last minute and the pressure allows us to trigger our ability to hyperfocus. So please don’t consider that as the only criteria to suspect someone has cheated.

To all the teachers saying they will switch to handwritten, in-class assessments to combat AI like this, PLEASE consider the impact of this for students with SEN.
DS (dyslexia, ADD, slow handwriting (poss dyspraxia?)) would fail massively under this regime at school, and yet is now working at 2:1/1st level at uni.

Also, I was absolutely the sort of student who would produce work overnight at the last minute once the deadline adrenaline kicked in!

Students with the SN you describe would have access to word processing in in class assessments. I'd imagine most schools will block access to this site.

As far as handwriting hem assessments, I always have this as a choice and the take up is usually about 70:30 in favour of typing longer pieces. After playing about , I am not worried about this ChatGPT for my subject at all. It's failed every task I set it!

Agree with @Piggywaspushed - in my subject the final grade all goes on final exams with no coursework and so we spend many an hour training all students to perform to the very best of their abilities in timed, closed book exam conditions, taking into account any SEND requirements and working with those rather than against them by developing exam strategies for each student.

I wouldn't be teaching professionally or prepping my students for exams properly if I didn't do that.

I have ASD and ADHD myself so I'm fully aware of the organisational and practical accommodations that often need to be in place in the classroom and the exam hall.

I’ve been teaching international foundation and first year HE students over the past year and am pretty sure I’ve seen this in action, was pretty obvious (and the work was rejected) though I wasn’t sure at the time what it actually was.
Interestingly Turnitin wasn’t picking it up - it just read very strangely and at odds with what I knew of students’ abilities from class. References were “off”.

On what basis was the work rejected? What reason was the student given?

TurnitIn won’t pick this up because it’s essentially generating ‘new work’ not cutting and pasting from elsewhere. What I’m not clear though is if it always generates the same answer for the same question? So, if a class of 20 all asked the same question, would the responses be the same?

The work was rejected largely because it didn’t meet the brief. It was only a handful of weaker students anyway, but their responses were both different enough to be unique, but stylistically similar and definitely not their own work (I told them I knew this, and they didn’t deny it). They resubmitted with some intensive supervision and achieved passing marks (just).

Students can't do this in an exam though so if they don't do any work and just get the Ai to produce their essays they aren't learning. The only thing that should happen is that no coursework goes towards the final mark.

I think our educational obsession with exams as the only means of testing students’ intelligence and ‘worth’ needs to change. The learn and regurgitate model really only assesses one set of abilities and prevents a significant proportion of students from demonstrating their capabilities. Moreover, it’s a skill which is rarely used in life after school - the ability to access information and evaluate it, build on it etc is far more important these days.
I understand teachers are concerned but I do think the solution will be to engage with students abut AI and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses.

Hopefully this means the end of coursework for a levels and GCSEs I'm sure teachers don't want to mark it and I'm sure it was a high cheat risk anyway. I would like to go back to ye olde traditional exams only like in the 60s and 70s.

We can tell.

When a student who struggles to write coherent English suddenly hands in a perfect essay you start to get suspicious.

The 'tippex test' is also useful. Copy the essay, tipex out every 5th word and ask the student to fill in the blanks.

Some students don't even check the font so the essay has 4 different ones.

I once had an essay talking about spy equipment and where you could buy hidden cameras. This was in health and social care, they had been asked about 'health surveillance' ie film badges id you work with X-rays.

Ha - me too, actually. Well, no ADHD diagnosis although I have my suspicions (dd2 has ADHD) but yes, I too often bang out entire schemes of work overnight in a hyperfocused deadline panic!

So no, not the only criterion. But if you're supervising an extended essay for IB - which requires considerable pre-reading & preliminary research & planning - & you know perfectly well the kid hasn't even started this because you've had a progress meeting where the kid just grunts 'dunno' to everything - then a rather polished preliminary draft on a similar, but not the same, research questions drops into your inbox at 4am...it's viva time.

Both the IGCSE course, IB course and IGCSE courses that we teach have coursework in them. We have oversight in terms of planning and drafting over a long period of time though and we know our students well so it’s pretty easy to have oversight.