AI Cheating Trap 480w

 

I found this today and was impressed with the author Will Teague's method of revealing who was completing essays with the help of an AI chatbot. As you can see, the source is HuffPost. Hit the link to read the entire piece. To summarize, a few salient paragraphs from the article:

  1. Since the spring semester of 2023, it has been apparent that an ever-increasing number of students are submitting AI-generated work. I am no stranger to students trying to cut corners by copying and pasting from Wikipedia, but the introduction of generative AI has enabled them to cheat in startling new ways, and many students have fully embraced it.
  2. So, I set out this semester to look more carefully for AI work. Some of it is quite easy to notice. The essays produced by ChatGPT, for instance, are soulless, boring abominations. Words, phrases and punctuation rarely used by the average college student — or anyone for that matter (em dash included) — are pervasive.
  3. A colleague in the department introduced me to the Trojan horse, a trick capable of both conquering cities and exposing the fraud of generative AI users. This method is now increasingly known (there’s even an episode of “The Simpsons” about it) and likely has already run its course as a plausible method for saving oneself from reading and grading AI slop. To be brief, I inserted hidden text into an assignment’s directions that the students couldn’t see but that ChatGPT can.
  4. I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.
  5. 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.

In other words, use your head. If you use AI to write, then intensively edit or rewrite it. Or better yet, do it yourself. You'll become a better writer. Pretty clever approach by Professor Teague!