AI Role in Education
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Opinion
Why companies lie about detecting AI writing
Dec 13, 2023
Sohan Choudhury | sohan@flintk12.com
Illustrated by AI, written by humans.
Originality in writing has been completely eroded within a year. ChatGPT was the first AI chat interface to gain widespread consumer adoption, and did so on an unbelievable scale. Almost immediately, it became clear to 100 million users that one of the biggest strengths of large language models was for writing.
ChatGPT lets anyone write anything, it seems. Now, with more powerful models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini being released, the quality of AI-generated writing has improved substantially.
While this makes LLMs phenomenal productivity assistants, the threat to education is clear. If AI trivializes writing, how do teachers effectively teach and assess students growing up in a world where their term paper is just a ChatGPT prompt away?
The tempting logical conclusion is to find AI’s kryptonite — a way to detect AI writing. Unfortunately, AI detection is a fool’s errand.
AI detection doesn’t work, and never will
Why do companies lie about AI writing detection?
The job of any company is to make a product that the market wants — to create a supply that addresses demand. The most innovative companies create products to meet emerging demands. AI writing detection is a massive emerging demand due to the massive emerging problem of students using AI to write.
Between schools and universities, there are millions of potential customers for AI writing detectors. The promise of a new multi-billion dollar market is incredibly tempting, especially if your target customers are educators who have an immediate need and lack the bandwidth to evaluate rapidly changing technology that is barely a year old.
Beyond the obvious — albeit clearly unethical — opportunity to sell fundamentally broken tools to buyers desperate for a solution, there’s a strong incentive for some companies to maintain the status quo.
Turnitin, for example, has spent over 25 years addressing plagiarism via similarity detection which is powered by internet sources and a massive trove of private submission data from over 30 million students. Seemingly overnight, due to generative AI, similarity detection became useless for preventing cheating. Instead of plagiarizing, students can generate entirely novel untraceable writing using ChatGPT in seconds.
If similarity detection no longer helps to ensure academic honesty, why should institutions continue to pay for Turnitin? This is an existential business risk for Turnitin and explains their desperate yet inevitably doomed attempts to introduce AI detection into their products.
Ultimately, we all want to believe that AI writing detection is possible because we’re afraid of change. We know that if AI writing can’t be detected, the future of teaching writing is in jeopardy. We’re too scared to rip off the band-aid, which makes us susceptible to deception from those who stand to profit by misinforming.
What should teachers do?
The only viable option for teachers is to embrace this change, as disruptive as it may be.
First, it’s important to recognize the reality that we’re in. Students will use AI to write, and there’s no way to detect if they do.
While this is concerning in terms of ensuring academic honesty, it’s important to remember that cheating on writing has always been a problem — in fact, the popularity of contract cheating through essay mills means that by 2017, over 31 million students had paid someone to write their paper for them. Before AI, 20,000 people in Kenya earned a living writing essays full-time.
What’s changed in the last year, then, is that cheating has now become more democratized because students can now cheat on essays for free and instantaneously thanks to generative AI.
Banning AI may be just as tempting as trying to detect AI writing, but it’s also not a realistic solution — especially when AI writing functionality is becoming embedded into everyday tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
It’s important to understand that students use AI for writing because these tools are inherently valuable. For students, AI writing:
Helps them get a better grade
Helps them improve their writing
While #1 is a concern for fair and accurate assessment, there’s potential for real educational value in #2. If students are using AI to get more immediate and tailored feedback, we should dig in here to understand how to best use AI to systematically improve student writing skills.
The future of learning to write
Learning to write will always be important. Generative AI is not to writing what the calculator was to math. I love Dan Willingham’s rebuttal of the analogy where he explains how, unlike with math, the content and process in writing will always impact the outcome:
So, how do educators continue to teach and hone the skill of writing given the advent of generative AI?
In the long run, how we assess writing has to change to become more adaptive to every student, and conversational assignments seem like a step in the right direction — especially as a replacement for standard written responses.
For essay writing, humanities teachers have been using AI to provide students with much more immediate and tailored feedback on their writing, thereby removing a key bottleneck in the learning process.
By having open conversations with students about their use of AI in writing, teachers can set guidelines around appropriate use and start to figure out what the future of learning to write will look like for their students.
And, here at Flint, we’re committed to never building or selling AI writing detectors.
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