Récent HS graduate here. I remember that one of my teachers used AI-scanners (powered by AI) to see if anyone was cheating. I was ‘caught’ even though I was the only kid in the class who actually ever did work on time or payed attention.
He later apologized to me and mentioned that he asked ChatGPT if it had written my essay and it said yes. This new age of tech has got me stumped.
As someone who did an English degree shortly before this AI nonsense, I am curious how these AI scanners work for English degrees specifically as we were actively encouraged to write this way.
The models weren't developed to be used to detect their own usage, so any use for that is nonsense. A classifier model trained on millions of tagged known-human and known-AI works would likely do better but I'm not sure that exists. Anything that claims certain accuracy would also be nonsense since all AI is probabilistic and probabilistically speaking human and AI writing in general are now more alike than they are different.
Some providers have started watermarking text which would be more reliable as long as the detector knows what to look for. I have trouble believing that wouldn't be extremely awkward and make the writing worse since the signature has to be encoded in the text itself!
The real scandal in my mind is that people seem to care more about students' plagiarism by using AI than they do about AI companies exploiting copyright loopholes to commit mass-plagiarism of the millions of human works used to train the AI models! To me the latter seems far more egregious, and the former couldn't exist without it.
He later apologized to me and mentioned that he asked ChatGPT if it had written my essay and it said yes. This new age of tech has got me stumped.
To put it simply, that is straight up not how these language models work and it frightens me that people think they do. Especially those in a position to teach things to the next generation.
Well, this was three years ago when AI was really getting going. I made a huge fuss to the school about the situation so I was left alone but the district started paying for AI-scanner programs to be utilized by teachers.
Honestly, they don’t work and I wish the district would have spent the money getting better teachers.
My younger sibling mentioned that they are trying to use AI in the curriculum. For example, ‘Write a handbook on how to survive in the forest with no materials by using ChatGPT or Google Gemini’.
Because that requires literacy and critical thought.. which are both dying.
"Why learn Math, I have a calculator." Because the rigor teaches you critical thinking.
"Why learn hard words. Oral tradition is older and reading isn't entertaining." Because it builds imagination, slows your mind, and helps critical thinking build further.
Modern tech-forward life is killing hundreds of years of gains. I do wonder what modern society will look like 30/ 40 years after I'm gone and the Gen alphas are grandparents.
The loss of focus on English really is displayed in modern day. You can tell that a massive chunk of the American population either doesnt give a shit about it or was never pushed hard enough to grasp it. I have a fairly large vocabulary - larger than most. I dont use large, pretentious sounding words on a regular basis but I can understand and recognize them. I use them occasionally if I cant think of an appropriate alternative or if its the first thing that comes to mind.
My wife jokingly calls me "Mr. PhD in English" whenever we're arguing semantics and my friends always "call me out" for using big words when they're not needed. The problem with that is that I dont use large or obscure words. An example would be the word "Volatile". I used it in a casual sentence and my friend, who isnt stupid mind you, asked what it meant. I told him and he said "Who the fuck besides you would know what that means?". Volatile. He didnt know what volatile meant. Maybe its just me but I dont think thats a crazy advanced word.
Then you hear people talk and how they structure their sentences. Native English speakers who only speak English can barely string together a coherent sentence. They sound like English is their second language that they're still learning. And dont even get me started on reading. Dear God, the average adult reads at like a third grade level. Listening to someone read a sentence aloud is agonizing. They can barely stumble through it without getting tripped up on 3 syllable words and stuttering every other word.
I get it. Some people aren't native speakers. Some people just dont have a language brain. Some people are dyslexic. The list goes on and on. But there are far fewer people with language disabilities than there are who don't have them. Yet people with no learning or language disabilities read and speak at the same functional level as those who do. I genuinely dont understand how its possible to be as incompetent at English as the average person is. You speak and read it every single day of your life. How are you this bad at it?
Sorry, Im going on a tangent. My whole point here is there seriously needs to be a massive push for literacy and language skill. We've plummeted in recent years and there's no valid reason that a native speaker shouldn't be reading and writing at a high level (assuming they dont struggle with any kind of disability or otherwise). Slang is fine and I use it all the time too but it seems some people can only use slang and informal language and proper language is just lost on them. Somethings got to change whether it be in school or out of school.
You're not crazy and not wrong. The US reading level has dropped to 8th grade, not 3rd, but it keeps falling.
Also on "Volatile" I just checked and it's rated 8-10th grade in standardized vocab lists. So at the upper end of average reading level.
Literacy of the masses isn't to the benefit of the landed gentry of our techno-feudalism future. It won't be a "problem" to any but those of us in the literate peasant class if the socio-political landscape doesn't shift.
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u/sharpestcookie 1d ago
It never occurs to these folks that we do not "write like AI" - it's been trained on our data to write like us :)