[thewataccount]

Hopefully they just flag relevant sections. Essay/Plagiarism checkers already exist, although in my experience professors were reasonable.

For example I had a paragraph or two get flagged as being very similar to another paper - but both papers were about a fairly niche topic (involving therapy animals) and we had both used the relevant quotes from the study conclusions from one of only a few decent sources at the time - so of course they were going to be very similar.

Given that most essays are about roughly the same set of topics, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of students writing these - I wonder how many variations are even possible for humans to write as I would expect us to converge on similar essays?

[michaericalribo]

Plagiarism is easier to verify, because you can directly compare with the plagiarized source material

[thewataccount]

Absolutely. I think it may have to end up more as a statistics thing with behaviour. For example:

"Tom had a single paragraph flag as possibly generated" vs "Every single paper Tom writes has paragraphs flag"

Basically we might have to move to detecting statistical outliers as cheating. Now whether the tools/teachers will understand/actually do that - we can only hope....

[blueblimp]

That's a good point: the effectiveness at detecting AI generation is probably going to depend strongly on the length of the text.