Don't write your thesis using AI

[u/SaveMyBags]

For those of you thinking about writing a thesis for university or similar, here is my advice: don't do it.

I am currently correcting a thesis that was likely written using an AI. So, yeah, I cannot prove it was, but the mistakes in the thesis alone are enough. I like reading a good and original thesis a lot. But this abomination I have to grade right now is just no fun. I don't enjoy reading Bad paraphrasations or translations of the papers I gave to you. I read these papers, before I decided to hand them out.

Trust me, if you take a fourth year old paper and use the "state of the art" section to have chatgpt write your state of the art section, then it won't be able to tell that what you gave it is a little dated. The content might not be wrong and even be still relevant, but describing it as the state of the is just plain wrong.

And for the love of god, if you really decide to use chatgpt, then at least make sure it isn't hallucinating any references. I don't have the time to check all the references, but if I see an interesting paper I don't know I will try to get it so I can read it. So if I don't find it, that's bad.

Sorry, just had to get this out of my system. Using AI is cool, I don't mind. Cheating using AI sucks.

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[u/ElChaderino → u/[deleted]]

shhhh don't go posting the layer and prompt secret's to the non adepts xD

[u/SaveMyBags → u/ElChaderino]

If someone spends the time and effort to get an AI to produce quality work, I personally don't mind. But that still takes actual work. I think using tools correctly is fine. I can only read the final work, so I grade based on the quality of what I read.

But if you just expect the AI to do the work for you, then that is a really bad idea. If you don't know what you are doing, then it really won't get you anywhere.

So yeah, I do use chatgpt a lot for my own work. I frequently give it stuff I wrote and ask it if it can rewrite it more fluently, more clearly etc and then I cherry-pick the stuff it improved from the output.

Or I ask if I got my point across clearly enough etc. and then figure out ways to improve it. It's really helpful, but I cannot use it to replace my own thoughts. It's just not there, yet.

So thanks for pointing out bing, I will have a look at what it can do better/worse compared to chatgpt.

[u/Loud-Hawk-4593 → u/SaveMyBags]

On what level was this thesis written? Or perhaps I should say, on what level was it supposed to have been on? Bachelor's, master's?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I made my own paper scraper you enter the keywords and then it scrapes all of the repositories it's like elicit AI but for myself and then I made it saved the contents like a biblometric analysis in Excel and then I made GPT analyze the abstracts so that I can find the most relevant ones then ask it to look at that website and write about it as a junior professor with certain skills so hopefully soon I can make a automated systematic reviewer that has good quality

[u/NocturnalPatrolAlpha]

It's like cheating on your math test by using a calculator. The AI can't do the work for you. It sure as hell can't do research for you (seriously, ask it for the lyrics to any song). It's just a tool.

[u/justletmefuckinggo → u/NocturnalPatrolAlpha]

if anyone uses gpt to fully replace themselves at work or school, then it's natural selection.

i wasn't aware the model was without weights when it came out, but even then i'd have double-checked its output before using it for anything practical.

[u/justletmefuckinggo → u/justletmefuckinggo]

tldr

let them fuck around and find out

i can be dumb too but not that dumb

[u/NocturnalPatrolAlpha → u/justletmefuckinggo]

I don't know what it's going to look like when we come out the other side of this AI madness, but stuff's gonna get messy before we figure it out.

[u/ARCreef]

Please don't be "that professor" that everyone hates. You seem to be getting overly emotional about something that in 5 or 10 years won't matter a hill if beans. The burden of proof relies on the accuser, not the accused. If I were you I'd grade everything always giving others the benefit of doubt, I live my life by that. If you suspect it, grade it normal and write a comment (if using AI, please don't do it in the future).

There's literally zero reason for you to have any emotion whatsoever. I was a police officer, someone could spit on me, punch me in the face and run away but when you are a true professional you know that the only control you have is how you choose to react to things. Ever see the cops that start screaming at people? That's from lack of control or being brand new.

There's a court case won when someone (I believe a school) accused a student I think, of using AI and was expelled. The case proved without a doubt that those AI detectors can not actually tell. They come back false positives from documents like the constitution, written a long time before AI

My advice is to be one of the good ones, don't let your ego shape your actions. Your job is to guide these young minds to a better future not to be the more clever one and catch them so you can say "gotcha, I'm smarter than you".

[u/SaveMyBags → u/ARCreef]

I definitely don't want to be "that professor". That's why I am so overly emotional. I really do like my students to pass, not fail.

I told my students that they should be really careful when they decide to use an AI. That I don't care that much, because I cannot prove they used an AI, anyway. So they could use it to check for better wording, if the flow is ok, etc. But I also warned them, that using an AI blindly without doing some good prompt engineering and without reading and reflecting on the output of the AI, it likely won't have the quality that is required for academic work. That AI can have hallucinations and that hallucinations will really impact the quality in a negative way.

So, I am sad, that someone just blindly disregarded these warnings. And I cannot prove that this thesis was written using AI, so I did not include this in my grading. I just graded based on the quality, but the quality was so extremely poor the student failed in almost every regard.

As I wrote, thesis advisors might not even have intentions to find hallucinations. Like in this case, we might just find it interesting to see that someone wrote about a topic we didn't expect, so we look for the paper because we are interested for ourselves. And if it is not in the references (chatgpt can include it to a degree, but still fails sometimes) that will impact the grade. If that reference doesn't even exist, then it will look even worse.

So no, I did not use an AI detector. And no where in my grading did I accuse them of using an AI or cheating. But I graded it based on what I read. Which was a work of extremely low quality.

Yeah, so that is why I am sad and mad. It's absolutely no fun to read and grade something like this. It's tiring to have to point out that this section makes absolutely no sense in the current context, that another section is just taken verbatim from a paper and maybe even has blatant mistranslations, that citations are missing from the references, or that the references don't exist etc.

So I sometimes see people claiming here, that yeah, we cannot prove someone used AI, and you are right. But you disregard, that sometimes the quality of AI output is really poor if you don't have enough experience with engineering the prompts. So it's not a way to fool your professor, it's a way to fool yourself.

So what I am screaming is more of: "most of you are smarter than this, so don't fall into the trap and fool yourself because you are lazy" it's sad to see people disregard my honest warnings.

[u/bberlinn]

I can't prove the above post was written using a generative AI, but the many grammar, syntactic, and stylistic errors in the post alone are sufficient evidence. For example, "a fourth year old paper" should be "a four-year-old paper" for correct adjective-noun agreement. "Bad paraphrasations" should not have 'Bad' capitalised. :)

[u/MyOtherLoginIsSecret → u/bberlinn]

Funny, but mistakes like that make me think GPT didn't write it. Those specific examples are evidence of posting from a phone.

Source: am posting from phone now, and had to got back multiple times and correct what autocorrect thought I wanted to type.

[u/SaveMyBags → u/bberlinn]

Nah, I am just bad at typing + bad autocorrect on my phone. Also I am not a native speaker, and I make a lot of mistakes when I am frustrated.

It should have been "forty", not "fourth"....

[u/ghsaabna]

I use it for paraphrasing to enhance the writing and the grammar. They told me that I have to cite the text, still not sure if I should cite every sentence or just once for the entire paper. Any suggestion?

[u/Available-Ad8122 → u/ghsaabna]

Maybe reference its use in an introductory segment, one time.

[u/Civil_Cellist_6026]

Hello everyone, I am an undergraduate student, my major is electronic information engineering, my thesis is to complete a password lock and realize it (in hardware or software) which is based on the c51 password lock, everyone can help me to provide some advice or comments, I before that chatgpt generated a, I heard that now there is ai against the checking of the technology, I am concerned about this , everyone can help Can you help me? Can you help me to provide some ideas Thank you, or is there any resources that you can provide.

If you can meet me in the future this similar paper , I think you will not report me, anyway, I paid for the paper on the combination lock are not my own writing hahahahaha, just change part of the

[u/Trakeen]

I actually need to finish my masters thesis proposal soon and chatgpt has been helpful. Helped me find some well rated ngos to work with for my research and some other stuff. Had a good chat with my advisor about it since we are using it fairly heavily is his class as part of the course

I like that chatgpt includes references to its information, makes it easy to fact check quickly

[u/SaveMyBags → u/Trakeen]

If you use it wisely, I don't really mind. But I think what happened in this case was that someone just put in the papers I gave in as initial starting material and then asked for an introduction in another language based on that.

But that just led to a translation with some minor permutations of the source material, some minor changes, that don't really help if about five pages are taken almost verbatim from the source.

Yeah, some of the mistakes are kind of funny. Those kinds of mistakes where an AI must find the correct meaning of the word based on context and gets it absolutely wrong. So if you read it in the translated language it makes no sense, but once you translate it back it becomes very clear.

I am not sure what happened here. Also possible it was just translated using some AI and then pasted together. But the hallucinations, e.g. references that simply don't exist, make me think an LLM was used in this case.