Shocking Truth Revealed: Students Evading Homework with the Help of AI Writing Tools!
It’s no secret that technology is transforming the way we live and learn. Nowadays, students have access to a wide range of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools that can assist them with writing assignments. While this technology may make the writing process easier, it has also become a means for students to evade doing their homework.
The shocking truth is that more and more students are relying on these AI writing tools to complete their written assignments. By simply inputting a few ideas and topics into these tools, students can generate essays, research papers, and even speeches in mere minutes. The AI writing tools use complex algorithms to analyze the inputted data and generate content that mimics human writing.
While these tools may be helpful for those who are struggling with writing processes due to grammatical errors, lack of creative writing skills, or difficulty coming up with ideas, some students are using them as a shortcut. Instead of doing their homework and putting in the time and effort required, they are using these AI writing tools to cheat their teachers and professors.
In a survey conducted by the College Pulse, a research company focused on college students, over 1,000 students were polled, and more than a third of them admitted to using AI writing tools to complete their homework. One student even said, “Why spend hours writing a paper when an AI tool can do it for me in minutes?”
This trend is worrisome, as it not only undermines the value of education but also puts a damper on the future of AI writing tools. While these AI writing tools should be seen as useful resources that can help students learn and grow, when used inappropriately they can do more harm than good.
Furthermore, educators need to recognize the danger and take appropriate action to instill ethics in students’ approach to learning. Teachers can use plagiarism-checking tools to detect students who use AI writing tools to cheat. They can also educate students about the dangers of relying on technology as the sole source of work production.
In conclusion, AI writing tools are rapidly changing the writing process, but they should not be misused. It’s time for educators, parents and students to come together and understand the importance of hard work and the consequences of cheating. We must encourage our students to take a more ethical approach to their studies, and while AI writing tools are sure to become more prevalent, their role should be to support student learning, not replace it.
Getting good grades in school may soon be about artificial intelligence (AI) as much as hard work.
- The increasing use of AI writing tools could help students cheat.Teachers say software that helps generate text can be used to fake homework assignments. One teacher says content from programs that rewrite or paraphrase content sticks out like a “sore thumb” at the middle school level.
Online software tools that help students write essays using AI have become so effective that some teachers worry the new technology is replacing creativity during homework assignments. Students are increasingly turning to these programs that can write entire paragraphs or essays with just a few prompts, often leaving teachers none the wiser.
“As far as I can tell, it is currently not that easy to detect AI writing,” Vincent Conitzer, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, told Lifewire in an email interview. “These systems do not straightforwardly plagiarize existing text that can then be found. I am also not aware of any features of the writing that obviously signal that it came from AI.”
Homework Helpers
The use of AI writing tools by students is on the rise, anecdotes suggest. Conitzer said he’s heard one philosophy professor say he would shift away from the use of essays in his classes due to concern over AI-generated reports.
Tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3/X, have seen tremendous improvement over the last few years, Robert Weißgraeber, the managing director of AX Semantics, an AI-powered, natural language generation (NLG) software company, said in an email interview. Users enter a short phrase or paragraph, and the tool extends that phrase or section into a lengthy article.
Don’t expect LLMs to replace real authors anytime soon, though, Weissgraeber said. GPT-3X tools are just “stochastic parrots” that produce perfect-sounding text, “however when looked at in detail, they produce defects called ‘hallucinations,’—which means they are outputting things that cannot be deduced from the arguments built into the input, data, or the text itself. The perfect syntax and word choices can dazzle the reader, but when looked at closely, they actually produce semantic and pragmatic gibberish.”
These systems do not straightforwardly plagiarize existing text that can then be found.
Catching AI Cheaters
AI-assisted writing programs are now so effective that it’s hard to catch cheaters, experts say. Other than making students write in a supervised setting, perhaps the best way for teachers to avoid the use of AI writing is to come up with unusual topics that require common sense to write about, Conitzer said.
“For example, I just had GPT-3 write the beginning of two essays,” he added. “The first was about whether free speech should sometimes be restricted to keep people safe, a generic essay topic about which you can find all kinds of writing online, and GPT-3 produced sensible text listing the pros and cons.
“The second was about what a teenager who was accidentally transported to the year 1000 but still has her phone in her pocket should do with her phone. GPT-3 recommended using it to call her friends and family and do research about the year 1000.”
Erin Beers, a middle school language arts teacher in the Cincinnati area, told Lifewire in an email interview that content from programs that rewrite or paraphrase content sticks out like a “sore thumb” at the middle school level.
The perfect syntax and word choices can dazzle the reader…
“I can usually spot fraudulent activity due to a student’s use of complex sentence structure and an abundance of adjectives,” Beers said. “Most 7th-grade writers simply don’t write at that level.”
Beers said she’s against students using most AI writing programs, saying, “Anything that attempts to replicate creativity is likely limiting a writer’s growth.”
Weißgraeber recommends teachers not be fooled by smooth-looking prose that may have been generated by AI. “Look at the argumentation chains,” he added. “Are all statements grounded in correlating facts and data that are also listed?”
However, despairing teachers take note. There’s at least one upside to students using AI tools, Conitzer contends.
“In principle, students could learn quite a few things from AI writing,” he said. “It often produces clear and well-structured prose that could serve as a good example, though the style is usually generic. Students could also learn more about AI from it, including how it sometimes still fails miserably at commonsense reasoning and how it reflects the human writing it was trained on.”
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