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by PeterisP 1232 days ago
Currently the false positive rate is far lower. E.g. I get 500-ish submissions over a school year then a 1% false positive rate would mean I'd falsely accuse 5 innocent students annually, which isn't acceptable at all - and a 9% FP rate is so high that's even not worth investigating; do you know of any grader who has the spare time to begin formal proceedings/extra reviews/investigation for 9% of their homework?

For plagiarism suspicions at least the verification is simple and quick (just take a look at the identified likely source, you can get a reasonable impression in minutes) - I can't even imagine what work would be required to properly verify ones flagged by this classifier..
2 comments
Fomite 1232 days ago
I really wish they'd have provided their false positive rate over several lengths of document, rather than an overall estimate. Because if it dives after say, 1,500 words, that's a relevant piece of information for its use.

I'm pessimistic, given they chose not to do so.

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TheRealPomax 1232 days ago
> I can't even imagine what work would be required to properly verify ones flagged by this classifier.

Yet.

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flatline 1232 days ago
At the same time the classifier is improving, the generative models are improving. It’s a classic arms race and this equilibrium is not likely to shift much either way. We are talking about models that approximate human behavior with a high degree of accuracy, I think the goal would be to make them indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
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PeterisP 1232 days ago
Can you elaborate?

I don't think that this is something that can change through tech advances for the classifiers - in all cases the classifier is just flagging for investigation, it's not sufficient for any action. For plagiarism, appropriate evidence comes from a person comparing the submission with the possible source of plagiarism. For this one, the proper evidence would require getting confirmation that the student actually generated that data - e.g. identifying the exact tool and prompt that was used, or logs from the students' computer showing that this was done, or logs from the text generation service provider. All of those are quite tricky to get and perhaps even not possible.

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