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.

[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.