Today I learnt something new about how high schools are deploying AI to try to detect AI-written content turned in by students.
My daughter explained to me how three of her fellow students were called up to the teacher one by one and informed that they were given no credit on their assignment, as the school’s tool said their assignment was written by AI. One student was told it was 100% certain it was written by AI, and another was told the score was 44%. Neither were given credit for their assignment. The latter student protested and said he had only used Grammarly to aid a little bit, to which the teacher responded with an attitude that she could only go by what the software said, but that she would try to speak with someone else about it.
Teachers will not succeed if they defer their jobs to AI, but most importantly, our students will not succeed if they constantly must live in fear of being incorrectly accused by an AI software of cheating, or worse. Fortunately, my daughter was not accused of it (I sure would have a field day with that).
But where do you draw the line? Is using Grammarly OK? Is Microsoft Word or Google Doc’s Auto-Suggestions OK to use? Is it OK to right-click a word and use Synonym suggestions?
Let’s face it – generative AI has arrived and will get more sophisticated every day.
Just like with any new technology, you must learn to live with it, and the same goes for teachers as well as students.
Educators must up their game in teaching the new ways of working.
Just blindly deploying AI to fight AI is not a solution.
Especially when there is a mad rush out the gate for all software vendors to proclaim they have new fancy AI capabilities – like this one here: The launch of Turnitin’s AI writing detector. They claim “we have been very careful to adjust our detection capabilities to minimize false positives” – well, that’s really reassuring.
Vik Bulletin 