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🌊 Texas prof failed half his class for using ChatGPT

apparently copied the essays into ChatGPT and asked if it had authored them.

Author

Marc Csuzi
May 18, 2023

Hello Surfers🏄! 

I love how everyone agrees that we should rethink education but we keep banning phones from the classroom and doubling down on written assignments. Well, ChatGPT might soon force us to pivot. As a Texas professor recently discovered, the task of identifying AI-generated text is proving to be quite challenging.

SCHOOL DISTRICT

🎓Texas prof failed half his class for using ChatGPT

Seniors at Texas A&M University have been temporarily denied their diplomas after a professor accused them of using ChatGPT for an assignment.

Dr. Jared Mumm, who teaches agricultural classes, apparently copied the essays into ChatGPT and asked if it had authored them. The AI chatbot confidently claimed authorship every single time.

The problem is: That’s just not how it works. LLMs can’t reliably detect AI-generated texts.

There are tools on the market to do that, but according to a study, they are not very trustworthy either. A simple paraphrasing (don’t worry, there are AI tools for that too) can bring down the accuracy of these detectors from 97% to 57%, which is equivalent to a coin toss.

The internet strikes back: Once the professor’s story began to attract attention, a redditor named Delicious_Village112 came across an excerpt from Mumm's PhD thesis on pig farming and submitted a section of that paper to the bot, asking if it might have written the paragraph.

“Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT, given the right prompt.”

Oh, the irony!

I have put on my white lab coat. I did my own little test with a document I recently compiled mostly with AI as well as a cover letter I found from ten years ago. I fed it through OpenAI’s text classifier as well as Winston AI a commercial detector that claims to be very accurate.

While OpenAI's tool asserted that both were unlikely to be generated by AI, Winston characterized them as predominantly authored by AI. Winston also falsely highlighted random chunks as written by AI:

The university has since confirmed that no students failed the class or were barred from graduating because of this issue, and several students have been cleared of any academic dishonesty.

Bigger picture: While schools are working on developing policies and adopting detection software to address the use or misuse of AI technology in the classroom, experts say we just need to learn to live with the fact that: “We may never be able to reliably say if a text is written by a human or an AI."

QUICK LINKS

✏️ Also in the news

New form of harassment: This girl found nudes of her generated by AI spreading on the internet.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman is working on a crypto project to distribute universal basic income(UBI) globally to mitigate AI caused unemployment.

AI is bad at PR: 61% of Americans think AI threatens humanities future.

Homeland Security uses AI tool to analyze social media of U.S. citizens and refugees. Yikes!

Tools worth trying 🔩

  • AI Diary: An emphatic chat based diary helping you get those words out. Is this the tool that finally gets me through a week of writing diary?

Ai Art of the day 🎨

Psychonauts by redditor u/DanielWyatt_Mograph is a beautiful crossover between a space travel and an LSD trip. Check out the whole collection with the prompts included here.

🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄🌊🏄

That’s it folks!

If you liked it please share it with a friend and make this writer happy that ChatGPT didn’t replace him yet!

Or did it?