When I was in high school I was a better writer when I had time (versus in class) and generally a better writer than I was a student. The net result was fairly often being accused of plagiarism. Not because the teacher had proof(I never plagiarized), but because the teacher couldn’t believe I could write to the level I sometimes wrote at on take home assignments. Admittedly, I was a wildly inconsistent student.

This reminds me a bit of that. AI writing is—in many ways—objectively very good, but that doesn’t matter if no one thinks you wrote it. AI writing is boring exactly because it is consistent and like any art form people want to see something original.

Sounds like a great opportunity for kids in high school to learn how to feed back the AI detection results into the model and have this process be automated. Next level would be fine tuning the model via reinforcement learning and sharing it with your friends via Hugging Face.

A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them.

Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.

If you're just going to use software to judge the output of students then why don't we all just keep them at home? I have a computer at home and it seems like everyone from the teachers to the school board have just abdicated their responsibility. This doesn't sound like a system that needs to be maintained.

Define "worse". I absolutely hated this formal essay style even before LLMs were a thing. All these "on the other side", "in conclusion" patterns with loads of generics of doesn't convey anything useful. And they make it really hard to tell if the writer is pretending to know anything or actually knows their shit but don't know how to write so that doesn't sound like an essay assignment. Good riddance.

On a side note: the fixed-pattern essay thing seems to be an American invention, or at least popularized by the American education system.

nobody's asking who profits from false positives. these AI detection vendors have a direct financial incentive to flag aggressively. more flags = "more value" = more school contracts renewed. same playbook as selling antivirus to your grandma. sell fear, charge per seat, and make the false positive rate someone else's problem.

I've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't). It literally just highlighted two popular English phases.

LLMs were trained on sites like HN and Reddit, so now if you write like a HN or Reddit commentator, you sound like AI...

The more students read, and the more variety they read, the better they will write.

This will likely be valuable for AI skills too.

This is what terrifies me about the public school system. A revolution has occurred, but it’s unevenly distributed.

The schools simply don’t have the flexibility, agility, or frankly it seems motivation to adapt to what has already happened.

The ship has sailed; essay writing is no longer a viable form of assessment.

The idea to try to build a reliable AI detector is asinine, and fundamentally misunderstands how any of this works now, let alone the very obvious trend-lines.

Stop with the lazy half-baked solutions, get your head out of the sand, rethink the whole curriculum. This is an emergency, we needed to be urgently attending to this years ago.

> The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excel

Did not this self censorship process started decades ago? There are certain answers expected in academia, arguing for anything else would get you in troubles. Not using “devoid” seems pretty minor inconvenience.

For me biggest wtf is why students are still expected to write graded essays, and to keep this make believe it is somehow useful and applicable skill.