Chat GPT -Homework now pointless?

[mids2019]

My daughter was given an essay to write on reincarnation as part of religious studies homework.

All the class basically used AI write the homework leading to presumably a teacher spending hours marking the results of an algorithm. Is this a good use t of time? Can teachers identify the use of AI? Do we need a new model of teching/in term examination that will be meaningful going forward in this new AI world?

I teach an essay subject for GCSE and a-level and can always tell a mile off if a student has used AI.
Facts are often wrong, but the quickest giveaway is the language style. We have subject specific terminology and the AI tool will invariably use slightly different terminology. A student would have to work really hard to make the work look like their own - nobody has managed it yet.

We also teach students how to get the best out of AI, rather than discouraging the use of it altogether. It can be a useful summarising tool.

However if you put that text into an AI checker it comes up 0 probability written by a human.

contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/

That's so obvious OP, there's something about the use of adjectives and the kind of afternoon tv-itis of the meaning it gives things. A lack of purpose if you will.

DD did a written exercise recently at school typed in a shared document so you could see the whole classes work, it was so very clear who'd GPTd their work they may as well have signed it AI.

Absolutely agree. There's software too that even disguises AI-generated text, so I'd imagine that makes it even harder. One thing I have found that works somewhat is not to compare to documented text (Turnitin), but rather to compare to other people's texts. I've actually used ChatGTP to find unique words or similar phrases between multiple (human?) texts and obtain similarity scores. ChatGTP has a style, and even those corrected ChatGTP texts have styles.
In all honesty, I didn't have this luxury when I did my PhD, so there's an element of jealousy here, but I do pity the laziness that this will propagate in the next generation. We're outsourcing creativity.

It is just another example of how our education system is not fit for purpose.

Why are we teaching our children stuff that a computer can do better and easier?

The jobs market is going to change and rapidly.

As a side matter-

Insisting students Handwriting is a massively retrograde step. Barely anyone Handwrites anything anymore. It's not needed and its not efficient.

It's a damn shame we spend so long insisting on skills that are rapidly becoming defunct. It would be better to teach every child to touchtype....

Of course you do. Or at least you catch every essay that you've caught. 😉

They are just going to get better and harder to catch

There will be detection tools for AI, but they may not keep pace with the AI and disguising tech. Currently, GPT will sometimes give you false references, as a friend of mine found when seeing if it could write an essay. She went to check the citations and they didn't exist. That may become a thing of the past though with the rate of development.

There's been quite a lot of legal action around AIs, it will be interesting to see the outcomes.

Until students type their exams or there is an overhaul of written exams, students need to write legibly and be able to construct an argument on paper in a coherent and linear way. Whether or not they should be handwriting exams is another matter entirely.

We've stopped setting written homework entirely for this reason. Our homework is revision sheets on paper that they have to fill in by hand. Old school but it works. Long answer written pieces have to be done in front of me.

Even then I've had a chat GPT assessment handed in (cover teacher in for 30 mins while I had an appointment and in that time they got out their phone 🤦‍♀️). But like previous posters said, it is sooooo obvious.

I like the cut of your jib @Icedlatteplease.

Rather than trying to beat AI, we should accept it can do 90% of the syllabus so that means we don't have to teach / learn it! We don't memorise logarithm tables anymore do we?

Imagine what humans could and should be doing with their time and intellect if AI has all of this covered?!

I was given an essay to mark today which included quotations from the text.
Unfortunately the student concerned didn't bother to check the work they handed in. The quotations are entirely made up... and that's only the start of the problems.
A cursory glance told me it was AI generated. Turnitin did the rest for me.

My concern is that as the technology develops we will be reliant more on exams and we were moving on a path which was less reliant on them to some extent.

Will those children that shone through coursework now be unduly penalised?

On another note is everyone absolutely sure that can detect AI easily? I suspect with a little amendment AI might be hard to spot and even if it is spotted how do you prove a child in effect has cheated?

I teach at UG and it stands out a mile because obviously I run any prompts through GPT myself. I imagine secondary teachers arwe doing the same and wondering how those kids will do in an exam

I'm not wondering. This child will fail.

At what point do you make the accusation if AI though to a child? It is quite a heavy accusation to make that of plagiarism.

I worry about essays that will eventually slip under the radar and teachers lauding students in error

We just give them other types of homework and make them do essays/writing pieces in class instead.

It's not always obvious when something is written by AI. I got Chatgpt to write a model literature essay for my Y12 MFL class. It was bloody great. Concise, well written, top grade standard, but certainly not implausible for a decent Y12 to have written it.

@AllProperTeaIsTheft

Does that make best use of your time as a teacher effectively having to invigilate mini exams? Do you think this is going to be the new normal?

Tell them to use bing chat as it gives reference links too.

Does that make best use of your time as a teacher effectively having to invigilate mini exams? Do you think this is going to be the new normal?

It's not so bad for us tbh. I'm an MFL teacher. We don't need to do spend thar much time doing full written pieces in class, as they only represent 25% of the whole exam, and are not very long. Tbh letting them do them at home was already a bit of a problem before AI due to online translators, which are much more frequently used than AI, especially at GCSE.

There are already effective AI checkers such as the one @AdultLounge shared above:

https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/

I imagine it's only a matter of time before Ai checking is incorporated into Turnitin.

In fact I've just checked and it has already: www.turnitin.com/solutions/topics/ai-writing/

The problem may arise when students edit SO output so it is a hybrid of SO and their own work. It would be interesting to see if such work passed plagiarism software. I noticed with basic question a like 'what is an electron' then a chat GPT answer easily could be conceived as being human produced (though a copy from wiki may yield they same result).

Do companies need to take responsibility as they are going to makeovers profits in both producing the AI software and the checking software?

The problem may arise when students edit SO output so it is a hybrid of SO and their own work. It would be interesting to see if such work passed plagiarism software.

It doesn't pass on Turnitin. That tells me what is plagiarised AND what it thinks is AI generated.

I am astonished that there are teachers on here that think they can always tell. I know from my own children that many enjoy the challenge of getting it past teachers and never get caught. At least the teachers at their school realise that they can’t always tell so they are thinking of ways of tackling it. Perfect punctuation is probably a bit of a giveaway but teenagers are capable of adding mistakes deliberately.

Yes it’s very obvious to anyone with eyes and command of the English language. Why don’t you ask Chat GBT to write something for you? What it is good for is applying structure to your document, however you have to do lots of rewriting to get the words to sound non-robotic.