
A.I. and the Future of Cheating - benbreen
https://onezero.medium.com/a-i-and-the-future-of-cheating-caa0eef4b25d
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> What happens when universities can’t tell whether an essay is written by a
> human or an algorithm?

Then in that scenario, that means that essays are worthless at evaluating
students, and if AI essays really are as good as human essays, then teaching
the writing of essays at the college level is a waste of time.

However, looking at the generated essay, it seems to me that the real problem
is that universities have reduced essay grading to an algorithm which values
form over the content of the essay. The fact that AI can generate content with
the required form should come as no surprise to anyone. Perhaps we should be
teaching critical thinking and reading skills to evaluate the actual content
of any essays.

~~~
comicjk
Computers have been able to do arithmetic faster, better, and cheaper than
humans for decades. But we still teach children to do arithmetic, and grade
them on how well they do it (almost never as well as a computer). Why? Because
doing more useful and creative math is a lot easier if you can do a little
arithmetic.

The purpose of college essays has never been the quality of the product. The
purpose is to have students practice so that, when they really do have to
convey something in writing, they can convey it well. If an idea exists only
in my head, it will take a very long time for an essay-writing bot to write it
for me.

~~~
Aperocky
Speaking from experience, the person that writes best code (in terms of both
raw quality and readability) also seem to write the best docs.

Maybe teaching essays are sideways to efficient communication?

~~~
mikorym
Although we have machines that now cut and bind books, the best book binding
(and most aesthetic) are done by hand by enthusiasts on, e.g., Reddit.
Moreover, such book binders don't feel threatened by machines, I would think,
like how people who do DIY do it because they like it, rather than because
they _have to_ do it.

Even if an AI can write an essay, that would not stop me from writing. Essays
have another important dimension, which is that of creativity and the message.
I think the only real relevance is in the context of school work, outside of
that I don't think the AI's ability is that important. People are intelligent
already, and competition between writers or the general tendency to influence
each other sometimes is even a good thing.

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mannykannot
The article quotes Miles Brundage:

 _“If it is not being used in an illicit fashion, A.I. can be a boon for
generating larger, more ambitious, more creative text documents — similar to
how calculators have been used to help develop the skills we want to be
teaching.”_

and it continues:

 _Calculators have spared maths and science students the laborious pain of
long calculations and allowed for more advanced syllabuses, designed with the
knowledge that students will have access to calculators when answering them._

The issue I have with this is that the role of the essay in education is not
comparable to that of the sort of tasks that calculators automate. If there is
an analog of calculators in essay-writing, it would be things like grammar-
correctors and style checkers.

If AI could be used in the manner envisioned in the quote, we could end up
with people writing essays that they do not understand, and presenting
arguments for positions that they could not defend. I am not sure that this
would be progress. It might be a way for the machines to take over.

~~~
kian
Although I love to write, I can imagine a world in which the construction of
sufficiently detailed outlines, along with some sort of style examples, could
be automatically converted into a full-fledged essay that elaborates on the
connections entered by a student or individual.

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lucasmullens
> If a university has no way of determining whether an assignment was written
> by a human or an algorithm, existing grading systems lose any semblance of
> meritocracy or fairness.

Just because it was hard to tell if it was written by an AI doesn't mean the
paper succeeds at whatever the assignment was. All GPT-2 does is predict the
next word. I don't see how this can be used to write a research paper.

~~~
colorincorrect
not that i believe (or not) that this will eventually be feasible, but the
dream is that if you feed an introductory paragraph (which includes a thesis)
to the algo, it will be able to generate the next 4 paragraphs, which
completes a 5 paragraph essay.

~~~
TACIXAT
What I would be more interested in is feeding it a topic, it goes out and
summarizes sources, then arranges those summaries to make a point. I'd
actually really like this driving around. I could just have ai give me the
tldr on topics I'm interested in.

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macawfish
The future of cheating is large corporations and billionaires using automation
to accumulate more society points without giving back to the hard working
people who make it all possible in the first place.

* Note: this is also the present of cheating.

* * Note: I hope this cynical statement of mine doesn't come true.

~~~
AlexCoventry
The future of cheating is no one having to work so hard, because machines are
doing all the boring work.

~~~
macawfish
I like your idea better

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minimaxir
Note that this was posted September 13th; before the full-size GPT-2 was
released yesterday after concerns about GPT-2's danger were unproven.

The _practical_ use case for GPT-2 in writing is writing
assistance/autocomplete, such as with Write With Transformer
([https://transformer.huggingface.co](https://transformer.huggingface.co)).
Text that _partially_ AI-written would pass a Turing test so-to-speak.

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symplee
Highly recommend testing this new cheating tool out by entering a custom
prompt at [https://talktotransformer.com/](https://talktotransformer.com/)
(which uses GPT-2) and reading what the AI generates for your custom essay
snippet.

A single sentence with a euphemism should suffice...

"I" was able to create some hilarious franken-stories. Anyone care to share
their greatest hits?

~~~
somebodynew
It seems to have a habit of responding to writing prompts by continuing to
write the prompt. College essay fodder like "Write about a situation in which
you overcame adversity." produces output that continues with "This doesn't
have to be a life-changing event, but you have to be honest." before diverging
directly into bullets 3 through 5 of a numbered list of other prompts like "A
story about how you did something right or how you have a great life now, and
then you go out and do it over and over again.".

On the other hand, I get interesting responses if I instead provide it with
the first two sentences of an answer to a prompt. I tried "I was only eleven
years old when he died. I started playing soccer and it made me who I am
today." and got:

"He died from complications of chronic renal failure. It's just a really,
really bad way to die.

You think about that. You're talking to a kid who just died from a medical
issue that was preventable, if not treatable. And you think about the kids who
die on the soccer field, all over this country, and you think about how that's
not OK."

It's not going to fool anyone, but it's a big step up from anything I've seen
before.

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jacobwilliamroy
So I've been playing around with GPT-2 and wow. It will write about anything.
It is like I am talking to everyone on reddit, all at the same time. And I
mean E V E R Y O N E on reddit.

GPT-2 is an abomination.

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29athrowaway
Imagine this use-case:

1) Copy some text to be plagiarized.

2) Feed text to AI so it's rephrased.

3) Present result as own work.

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dismantlethesun
Interestingly enough, I fed those lines into an AI[1] and it spit out:

1) Start copying some text from another source.

2) Start rephrasing text.

3) Present result as own work.

You are now a master plagiarist.

\-----

So I think you're onto something. The AI is a far faster rewriter of text than
human beings.

[1] [https://talktotransformer.com/](https://talktotransformer.com/)

~~~
29athrowaway
I can see that item 3 is the same. Still very impressive.

