In one of my classes, when ChatGPT was still new, I once handed out homework assignments related to programming. Multiple students handed in code that obviously came from ChatGPT (too clean a style, too general for the simple tasks that they were required to do).

Decided to bring one of the most egregious cases to class to discuss, because several people handed in something similar, so at least someone should be able to explain how the code works, right? Nobody could, so we went through it and made sense of it together. The code was also nonfunctional, so we looked at why it failed, too. I then gave them the talk about how their time in university is likely the only time in their lives when they can fully commit themselves to learning, and where each class is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn something in a way that they will never be able to experience again after they graduate (plus some stuff about fairness) and how they are depriving themselves of these opportunities by using AI in this way.

This seemed to get through, and we then established some ground rules that all students seemed to stick with throughout the rest of the class. I now have an AI policy that explains what kind of AI use I consider acceptable and unacceptable. Doesn't solve the problem completely, but I haven't had any really egregious cases since then. Most students listen once they understand it's really about them and their own "becoming" professional and a more fully developed person.

Distillation:

Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.

I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”

I decided to not punish them. All I know how to do is teach, so that’s what I did. I assigned a wonderful essay by Cal Poly professor Patrick Lin that he addressed to his class on the benefits and detriments of AI use. I attached instructions that asked them to read it and reflect. These instructions also had a Trojan horse.

Thirty-six of my AI students completed it. One of them used AI, and the other 12 have been slowly dropping the class. Ultimately, 35 out of 47 isn’t too bad. The responses to the assignment were generally good, and some were deeply reflective.

But a handful said something I found quite sad: “I just wanted to write the best essay I could.” Those students in question, who at least tried to provide some of their own thoughts before mixing them with the generated result, had already written the best essay they could. And I guess that’s why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do.

Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a saviour. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.

Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.

I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”

Christ.......

Here's the link to the actual article. I get that you're trying to do users a favour to bypass tracking at the original URL, but the Internet Archive is a Free service that shouldn't be abused for link cleaning as it costs a lot of money to store and serve all this stuff and it's meant as an "archive", not an ad-blocking proxy.

I'm posting this in part because currently clicking that link errors it with a "too many requests" error. Let's try to be a little kinder to the good guys, shall we?

If users wasnt a cleaner/safer/faster browsing experience, I recommend ditching Chrome for Firefox and getting the standard set of extensions: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc.

From later in the article:

Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a saviour. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.

I think this is the big issue with 'ai cheating'. Sure, the LLM can create a convincing appearance of understanding some topic, but if you're doing anything of importance, like making pizza, and don't have the critical thinking you learn in school then you might think that glue is actually a good way to keep the cheese from sliding off.

A cheap meme example for sure, but think about how that would translate to a Senator trying to deal with more complex topics.... actually, on second thought, it might not be any worse. 🤷

Edit: Adding that while critical thinking is a huge part. it's more of the "you don't know what you don't know" that tripped these students up, and is the danger when using LLM in any situation where you can't validate it's output yourself and it's just a shortcut like making some boilerplate prose or code.

But I am a historian, so I will close on a historian’s note: History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost for many Americans, ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognised that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognised that literacy is liberation.

It's scary how much damage is being done to education, not just from AI but also the persistent attacks on public education in the US over decades, hampering the system with things like No Child Left Behind and diverting funds to private schools with vouchers in the name of "school choice". On top of that there are suggestions that teachers aren't even needed and that students could be taught with AI. It's grim.

I'm guessing 33 people were too lazy to copy data into a box and relied on ChatGPT OCR lol.

This was a great article about the use of AI, but I think this also exposed bad/zero effort cheating.

There's a reason why even the ye olde Wikipedia copy-pasters would rearrange sentences to make sure they can game the plagiarism checker.

Okay fine and all, but are we not going to talk about the cat?

39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI

That's better than my class. I taught CS101 last year, code not papers. 90%+ of the homework was done with AI. There was literally just 1 person who would turn in unique code. Everyone else would turn in ChatGPT code.

I adapted by making the homework worth very little of the grade and moving the bulk of the grade to in-class paper and pencil exams.