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by skissane 195 days ago
Someone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated
3 comments

A New York lawyer used ChatGPT to write a filing with references to fake cases. After a human told him they were hallucinated, he asked ChatGPT if that was true (which said they were real cases). He then screenshotted that answer and submitted it to the judge with the explanation "ChatGPT ... assured the reliability of its content." https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63107798/54/mata-v-avia... (pages 19, 41-43)
I hope he was disbarred.
He was probably offered a role at some ai obsessed firm because of his “ai-native workflow”.
I'm just worried he was tapped for a position in the current administration.
Or sent to court-ordered LLM Awareness classes.
Reminds me of a Reddit story that made the rounds about a professor asking ChatGPT if it wrote papers, to which it frequently responded afirmatively. He sent an angry email about it, and a student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email.
> student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email

Which is actually fine. Students need to do their own homework. A teacher can delegate writing emails.

But if he didn't delegate, and it said he did, that would suggest that the methodology doesn't really work.
I believe you just got whooshed.
Yes, I missed the student using the teacher's trust in those tools to make them even more angry and neuter their angry email that they (probably) actually wrote themselves. Well-played.
A person arguing in favor of LLM use failed to comprehend the context or argument? Unpossible!
I realize you might have failed to comprehend the level of my argument. It wasn't even about LLMs in particular, rather having someone/something else do your work for you. I read it as the student criticizing the teacher for not writing his own emails, since the teacher criticizes the students for not writing their own classwork. Whether it's an LLM or them hiring someone else to do the writing, this is what my rebuttal applied to. I saw what I thought was flawed reasoning and wanted to correct it. I hope it's clear why a student using an LLM (or another person) to write classwork is far more than a quality issue, whereas someone not being tested/graded using an LLM to prepare written material is "merely" a quality issue (and the personal choice to atrophy their mental fitness).
I don't think I was arguing for LLMs. I wish nobody used them. But the argument against a student using it for assignments is significantly different than that against people in general using them. It's similar to using a calculator or asking someone else for the answer: fine normally but not if the goal is to demonstrate that you learned/know something.

I admit I missed the joke. I read it as the usual "you hypocrite teacher, you don't want us using tools but you use them" argument I see. There's no need to be condescending towards me for that. I see now that the "joke" was about the unreliability of AI checkers and making the teacher really angry by suggesting that their impassioned email wasn't even their writing, bolstered by their insistence that checkers are reliable.

Two posts from you addressing a one-line reply? May be time to put down the coffee and take a drag from the mood-altering-substance of your preference.
Apologies to everyone I upset by this comment. It was just an innocent mis-reading of the joke. Lesson learned.
You missed the entire point lol
Yeah, I'm really sorry. I didn't realize it would upset so many people.
Students (and some of my coworkers) are now learning new content by reading AI generated text. Of course when tested on this, they are going to respond in the style of AI.