[teekert]

"AI use detection" is, like any test, not without cost. Meaning that, as a teacher, accusing a student of using an LLM, it may be prudent to consider the cost of a "false positive" accusation. I've seen a couple of examples now where students find sudden spurts of motivation and show unexpected talent on an assignment, to be accused of AI use after handing it in.

One should ask oneself: How many insults to the intelligence and creativity of an unexpectedly excelling student (that hasn't used AI) is it worth catching the shortcut-taking, LLM-using student? Is it 1/10? 1/1000? How much "demotivation of an unexpectedly excelling student" is the "rightful punishment of the cheating LLM using student" worth? And what is the exact cost of a false negative (letting the LLM using student off the hook)?

In other words, where on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve do you want to sit, as a teacher? I imagine it's quite the dilemma.

[macintux]

~30 years ago I sat down with two students and accused them of copying each others’ work, because they both made the same amusing mistake: they called their C functions without passing arguments, but they declared their variables in such a way that the values would coincidentally be in the right place on the stack. I have to imagine debugging their own code was a mystery.

They indicated that while they worked closely together while learning the material, they weren’t stealing from each other. I believed them then, and still believe them now, but I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with today’s AI world.

[socks]

The non-LLM version of this happened to me in a high school English class, back in the 2010's. I was accused of turning in a downloaded story from the internet, but in reality, I had pushed past the incredible barrier I usually felt at the start of a task, got into the flow, and started enjoying it.

I'm not sure if it had any lasting effects. Maybe a burning hatred of Grammarly ads.