It’s really a shame that OpenAI hasn’t deployed its technology for detecting whether text was generated using ChatGPT, despite it being developed 2 years ago.
They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI’s inaction damages the academic environment – especially for the non-cheating students, but even for the cheaters, too.
You’ve got to prove you can be trusted to do the right thing in small instances before you can be a candidate for being trusted to do the right thing in big instances. I hope OpenAI will get their act together and do the right thing. This is not a hard test, but so far, they’ve failed it. I hope they will pass by releasing it ASAP.
Here are my responses to the most common objections to my points that I’m seeing in the comments:
Objection 1: It’s impossible to detect whether something is written by AI: this is untrue. The technology has already been developed, and it uses watermarking. The token generation process is modified so that you can detect which AI wrote the text, even if sentences are re-ordered, or some words are swapped. Of course, with sufficient editing, the watermark will be gone.
Objection 2: Kids will just switch to other AIs in order to cheat: some will, but even small behavioral barriers making something more difficult can cause big changes in the frequency of a behavior. Additionally, it will raise the chance of being caught quite a bit, which can also have big behavioral consequences. Finally, OpenAI really should work with the other top AI companies to produce watermarking standards so that all the top AI companies include watermarking.
Objection 3: Eventually, this tech will get beaten, so there is no point: that is a weak argument. Every spam filter gets beaten by some spammers, but the solution is not to give up on spam detection; it’s to continually evolve the methods to keep spam at a minimum. Similarly, it’s better to have a dynamic situation where cheating isn’t so easy and the risk of getting caught cheating isn’t that low.
Objection 4: Essay writing is an antiquated skill now that we have AI: the purpose of learning to write essays is to practice thinking clearly and communicating. It’s an extremely bad idea to stop teaching kids how to think clearly and communicate well. Yes, in real life, they can use AI assistance, but they still need to practice thinking and communicating – outsourcing these critical skills to AI instead of learning them yourself is a very unwise idea.
This piece was first written on August 4, 2024, and first appeared on my website on August 25, 2024.
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