AI is getting very, very good at cheating

In the "arms race" between AI cheatbots and detection software, the cheaters are winning, reports Dana Goldstein in the New York Times.

"Humanizers rewrite A.I.-produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic and trite," she writes. "Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents, making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when in fact, they were produced by A.I. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions."

Colleges and K-12 schools can't keep up, she writes. More than 90 percent of professors in a recent College Board survey are worried about plagiarism and dishonesty.

AI takes old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism to a new level. Students don't need to research or write. They don't need to think. "Cognitive offloading" is bad for the brain. It's like watching an exercise video without actually exercising.

Social media is full of videos encouraging students to take it easy, writes Goldstein. Have a sandwich. Watch YouTube.

... Established companies often urge students to use their tools responsibly as aids for studying, research, brainstorming, outlining and revision. But many of them are simultaneously producing technology that can easily be used to plagiarize and cheat. They put out tongue-in-cheek ads alluding to their ability to help students get away with something.

Start-ups may explicitly show students how to cheat, Goldstein writes. For example, instructors can check a document's history. "If 1,000 words suddenly appeared in a Word or Google document at 11:59 p.m., it could mean the student pasted in text produced by a chatbot."

Autotypers defeat those checks, she writes. Dripwriter’s website promises “believable typos and fixes” along with "background auto typing so your essay keeps working when you step away.”

Grammarly, which checks spelling and grammar, now offers an “authorship” tool to enable professors to scan a document's earlier version to check for "authorship," Goldstein writes. "At the same time, the app allows students to generate writing from scratch, humanize text, and scan and replace phrases that could set off A.I. detectors." In addition, Grammarly's paraphraser rewrites "any published text a student copies and pastes into a browser tab."

GPTZero "claims to be 99 percent effective in detecting A.I. content, including some use of humanizers and autotypers," writes Goldstein. Students can learn from TikTok how to use the app to see how professors will check for cheating, then modify their paper to avoid detection. GPTZero "can also generate a full academic paper in mere moments, complete with quotes and citations."