Students can present original, critical work in presentations, podcasts, videos and reflective writing. This may even be an opportunity to move away from the sort of conventional essay questions that can so easily be fed into ChatGPT. What is to be done? In the desperate – and largely futile – scramble to “catch up” with AI, there is a real danger that academics lose sight of why we assign essays in the first place: to give students the opportunity to display their ability to evaluate information, think critically and present original arguments. Innocent students will inevitably find themselves in a kind of Kafkaesque computational scenario – accused by one automated software of improperly relying on another. Students who don’t fall into those categories are also more likely to turn for support to spelling and grammar checkers like Grammarly, which also uses generative AI to offer stylistic suggestions, putting them at risk of running foul of AI detectors even when the substantive ideas are original. A combination of ChatGPT and AI “humanisers” might even carry someone through university with a 2:2.īut if universities treat this as an arms race, it will inevitably harm students who rely on additional support to survive a system that is overwhelmingly biased to white, middle-class, native English speakers without disabilities, and whose parents went to university. And it’s true that ChatGPT can plausibly write mediocre university-level essays. Many academics have translated the hype around AI to a heightened suspicion of students. It was a distressing experience for my student, and one that is being repeated across the sector. Still, I was making a high-stakes call without reliable evidence. But the defence was also convincing, and this particular student had been consistently writing in this style long before ChatGPT came into being. I admit to trusting the human over the machine. When my student contested the AI detector’s judgment, I granted the appeal. It’s also not hard to find desperate students asking how to beat false accusations based on unreliable AI detection. It’s not hard to find students sharing tips online about evading AI detection with paraphrasing tools and AI “humanisers”. Students and lecturers are caught in an AI guessing game. There is no reliable way to reproduce the same text for the same prompt, let alone to know how students might prompt it. ChatGPT has more than 180 million monthly users, and it produces different – if formulaic – text for all of them. Unlike the “similarity report”, which includes links to sources so that lecturers can verify whether a student plagiarised or used too many quotations, the AI detection software is a black box. But the tool is not definitive: while the label announces that an essay is “X% AI-generated”, a link in fine print below the percentage opens a disclaimer that admits it only “might be”. Facing a threat to its business model, Turnitin has responded with an AI detection software that measures whether an essay strings words together in predictable patterns – as ChatGPT does – or in the more idiosyncratic style of a human. Prompted with an essay question, ChatGPT produces word combinations that won’t show up in a similarity report. Generative AI makes copying and pasting seem old-fashioned. A high similarity score does not always mean plagiarism – some students just quote abundantly – but does make it easier to find copy-and-paste jobs. Before ChatGPT, Turnitin’s primary function was to produce “similarity reports” by checking essays against a database of websites and previously submitted student work. The software that scanned my student’s essay is provided by Turnitin, an American “education technology” giant that is one of the biggest players in the academic misconduct market. But my standout student contested the referral, claiming university-approved support software they used for spelling and grammar included limited generative AI capabilities that had been mistaken for ChatGPT. Policy demands that I refer essays with high AI detection scores for academic misconduct, something that can lead to steep penalties, including expulsion. I found myself in an increasingly common predicament, caught between software products and humans: students and ChatGPT on one side, lecturers and AI detectors on the other.
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