The (Graded) Essay Is Dead
And other developments this week
[disclaimer: I do not speak on behalf of my employer. Views are my own, expressed with AI assistance]
As educators we’ve already started to face an unprecedented challenge: the rise of AI-based academic dishonesty. For the past year, the issue has moved from being a distant sci-fi hypothetical to a disruptive reality infiltrating our classrooms and undermining our teaching methods.
Many of us have comforted ourselves with the belief that AI detection software would rise to the challenge of identifying artificially generated content, just as plagiarism software arose to address the challenges created by the internet.
Maybe someday. For now, we have no reliable defense against AI-based academic dishonesty. None.
As I learned in this video, OpenAI — the team behind ChatGPT and current leaders in the field — pulled their AI Classifier for being too error prone. They’re frantically building and testing its replacement. But if you read between the lines about the progress so far, there’s little reason for optimism about the new model either.
“Our classifier is not fully reliable. In our evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely…
