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Dec 27, 2022Liked by Matt Dinan

The academic panic over GPT seems to confuse two concerns: first, the AI does the assignment better than your average student, and second, that the AI is "undetectable" as a plagiarism aid. The first point seems to be true but irrelevant since the AI is not your student, and the second point is plainly false, since it's quite detectable once you see how it works a couple times. I don't have small classes or even know all my students' names, and I easily noticed several AI-generated papers this term. In fact, they're much easier to notice than when a student pays/asks/seduces a classmate or someone else to write papers for them, because the results of these efforts look actually indistinguishable from an "honest" paper (including, sometimes, indistinguishably bad!) and there is no accessible evidence to ground one's suspicions. But that mode of cheating has been around forever. Honestly, I don't understand this level of panic. Academics are just hyperventilators who constantly require a bag to breathe in.

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