We Have to be Cautious With Hallmarks of AI in Scholar Writing

To the Editor:

In a current column (“Anatomy of an AI Essay,” Inside Increased Ed, July 2, 2024), Elizabeth Steere described an evaluation of AI-generated responses to essay prompts from her programs. Whereas this evaluation is efficacious, its framing may give false confidence to instructors making an attempt to find out if a pupil’s work was AI-generated. 

To Dr. Steere’s credit score, the column itself doesn’t explicitly counsel that readers use the report with a purpose to resolve if a particular pupil project was AI-authored. Furthermore, in one other current column (“The Hassle with AI Writing Detection,” Inside Increased Ed, October 18, 2023), Dr. Steere discusses the perils of false plagiarism or AI-use allegations, and notes that her function is to not “play plagiarism police.” Whereas the brand new and earlier columns don’t instantly contradict each other, readers might come away from the newer work with the misguided concept that, armed with a catalog of purple flags, they’ll catch dishonest college students presenting AI-authored work as their very own. I wish to emphasize that my following critique will not be concerning the info Dr. Steere presents—slightly, it seeks to discourage hypothetical future misuse of that work.

So, why may readers misuse this catalog of AI purple flags? I feel there are a number of intertwined points. 

First, Dr. Steere writes: “I took word of the traits of AI essays that differentiated them from what I’ve come to anticipate from their human-composed counterparts.” It feels like she enumerated AI hallmarks after which in contrast their frequency within the AI essays to the methods she remembers her human college students writing in response to comparable prompts. This sort of comparability dangers affirmation bias, as mistaken beliefs about how typically people use these hallmarks may distort reminiscence. A stronger method would entail direct quantitative comparability of AI to human writing. Ideally, such an evaluation would result in a transparent choice rule for categorizing writing as AI or human authored, and the rule could be examined on novel writing samples.

Second, even when the cataloged purple flags can point out whether or not essays have been written by AI or as a substitute by Dr. Steere’s human college students, it’s not clear if these inferences generalize to different teams of scholars, sorts of writing project, or scholarly disciplines. College students with totally different coaching and experiences typically write in very other ways. One motive that automated AI detectors have largely fallen by the wayside is that they’re extra more likely to report college students writing in a second language as dishonest. Arguably, a lot of educational coaching consists of socializing college students in discipline-specific scholarly communication strategies.

The generalization concern will not be trivial, particularly if the readers of Inside Increased Ed—college from throughout educational disciplines—attempt to use Dr. Steere’s evaluation in evaluating college students. For example this, take into account what may occur if I used the purple flags to establish cheaters in my psychology analysis strategies course

My college students are requested to comply with the conventions of APA type, which might result in awkward constructions and tortured phrases, together with the avoidance of first individual and the usage of passive voice in lots of contexts. As in lots of journal articles, sections of their papers are list-like, typically repetitive, and embrace formulaic beginnings and endings to paragraphs. Whereas it’s not what I ask of them, in an effort to sound “extra scientific,” many college students use “large phrases” they don’t want. As college students battle to learn and interpret the first scientific literature, they typically look like confidently improper and depend on analogies and metaphors to grasp and talk what they’ve learn. As soon as they do grasp a brand new idea, they typically converse hyperbolically, in absolute phrases, or as if their newfound information sweeps throughout all contexts as a substitute of being narrowly relevant.

All these traits are purple flags recognized in Dr. Steere’s evaluation. I’d speculate that the corpora on which frequently-used AI fashions have been educated embrace a lot scientific writing—which might imply that the very hallmarks of dishonest with AI may be the hallmarks of profitable studying of discipline-specific writing type. We have to be cautious in generalizing heuristics for distinguishing AI and human work throughout contexts.

Lastly, dependable group variations may not be informative about particular person outcomes (considered one of many on a regular basis statistical issues illustrated right here). For instance, I do know that males are taller than ladies, on common. But when I’m informed that somebody is 5’8”, I can’t say with any diploma of confidence whether or not that individual is a person or a girl. It’s because, whereas abstract measures of males’s and ladies’s heights are totally different, there’s a lot overlap within the variability round these abstract measures. Given 100 folks standing 5’8”, it’s probably that extra are males than ladies—however I’d not wish to motive from this details about the intercourse or gender of a person. Equally, the AI purple flags described by Dr. Steere may become adequate to allow us to help an announcement like, many college students in my class of 100 should have used AI, however that doesn’t imply we now have actionable proof about anybody pupil’s work.

Dr. Steere’s columns have sought to assist us via an instructional disaster. I feel her work is efficacious. As all of us battle to cope with AI within the classroom, many people have grasped for any doable lifeline. I’m involved that this desperation may lead some to misuse Dr. Steere’s evaluation. OpenAI shut down its personal AI detection device as a result of it couldn’t reliably detect dishonest. With out sturdy proof, we should not delude ourselves into considering that our personal heuristics are any higher.

–Benjamin J. Tamber-Rosenau

Assistant professor of psychology, College of Houston