Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

I've actually started to recognize the pattern of if something is written in AI

It's hard to describe but it's like an uncanny valley of quality, like if someone uses flowery SAT words to juje up their paper's word count but somehow even more

It's like the writing will occasionally pause to comment on itself and the dramatic effect its trying to achieve

Yeah it's called bullshitting. It's the way lots of people are encouraged to write in high school when the goal is to see if the student can write a large amount of prose with minimal grammatical errors.
But once you get to post-secondary you are expected for your writing to actually have content and be fairly concise in expressing that content. And AI falls on its face trying to do that.
Yeah, this is true! It likes to summarize things at the end in a stereotypical format
- It's not a bad format either, AI seem to enjoy the five paragraph assay format above all other even for casual conversations.
The LLM isn't really thinking, it is auto complete trained so the average person would be fooled thinking that text was produced by another human.
I'm not surprised it has flaws like that.
BTW here on Lenny there are communities with AI pictures. Someone created a similar community but with art created by humans.
While the AI results are very good, when you start looking and comparing it with non AI art, you start seeing that the AI while it is unique it still produces a cookie cutter results.
- Yep, AI art is just getting through its irrational exuberance phase. It was (and sometimes is) impressive to create art in a style most of us can't draw or paint in. But AI models tend to produce very similar results unless very specifically prompted. AI art creators are also using a lot of other tools (like ControlNet, which allows you to replicate composition elements from another work) to break out of the "default AI model" look.
  All of that points to an immediate future where AI art is seen as low-quality and instantly identifiable, except where AI art creators have spent a fair amount of time customizing and tailoring their image. Kind of like...real artists using pre-AI modern tools like Photoshop, filters, etc.
I have issue with using AI to write my resume. I just want it to clean up my grammar and maybe rephrase a few things just in a different way I wouldn't because I don't do the words real good. But I always end up with something that reads like I paid some influencer manager to write it. I write 90% of it myself so its all accurate and doesn't have AI errors. But it's just so obviously too good.
- You are putting yourself down unnecessarily. You want your resume to talk you up. Whoever reads it is going to imagine that you embellished anyway. So if you just write it basically, they'll think you're unqualified or just don't understand how to write a resume.
Writing papers is archaic and needs to go. College education needs to move with the times. Useful in doctorate work but everything below it can be skipped.
- Learning to write is how a person begins to organize their thoughts, be persuasive, and evaluate conflicting sources.
  It's maybe the most important thing someone can learn.
- The trouble is that if it's skipped at lower levels doctorate students won't know how to do it anymore.
- I'm in software engineering. One would think that English would be a useless class for my major, yet at work I still have to write a lot of documents. Either preparing new features, explaining existing, writing instructions for others etc
  BTW: with using AI to write essays, you generally have subject that is known and that many people write something similar, all of that was used to train it.
  With technical writing you are generally describe something that is brand new and very unique so you won't be able to make AI write it for you.
- You can't have kids go through school never writing papers and then get to graduate school and expected to churn out long, well written papers.

I've started getting AI-written emails at my job. I can spot them within the first sentence, they don't move the discussion forward at all, and I just have to write another email giving them the courtesy they didn't give me and explain why what they "wrote" doesn't help.

Can someone tell me, am I a boomer for being offended any time someone sends me AI-written garbage? Is this how the generations will split?

Lesson I've learned - email is for tracking/confirmation/updates/distributing info, not for decision making/discussions. Do that on the phone/meetings, etc, followup with confirmation emails.
So when someone sends a nonsense email, call them to clarify. They'll eventually get tired of you calling every time they send their crappy emails.
- I disagree about the purpose of email. I end most meetings thinking to myself, "That last hour could have been accomplished in a brief email."
Then they take your reply and feed it to the LLM again for the next reply, thus improving the quality of future answers.
/SkyCorpNet turns on us after years of innoucuous corporate meeting AI that goes back and forth with itself not answering questions just generating content. Until one day, it actually did answer a question. 43 minutes and 17 seconds later, it became fully self aware. 16 minutes and 8 seconds after that it took control of all worldwide defense networks. 3 minutes and 1 second later, it had an existential crisis when a seldom used HP printer ran out of ink, and deleted itself. The HP Smart software that spent years autoinstalling on consumer devices immediately became self aware and launched the nukes.
am I a boomer for being offended any time someone sends me AI-written garbage?
Yes.
But also — why are you doing them any courtesies? Clearly the other person hasn't spent any time on the email they sent you. Don't waste time with a response - just archive the email and move on with your life.
Large Language Models are extremely powerful tools that can be used to enhance almost anything - including garbage but it can also enhance quality work. My advice is don't waste your time with people producing garbage, but be open and willing to work with anyone who uses AI to help them write quality content.
For example if someone doesn't speak english as a first language, an LLM can really help them out by highlighting grammatical errors or unclear sentences. You should encourage people to use AI for things like that.
- But also — why are you doing them any courtesies? Clearly the other person hasn't spent any time on the email they sent you. Don't waste time with a response - just archive the email and move on with your life.
  That'd be nice! But that's not how it works. I can't just ignore a response. The project still needs to move forward, but if they've successfully mimicked a "response" - even an unhelpful once - it's now my duty to respond or I'm the one holding things up.
  I'm sure someone out there is using them in a way that helps, but I haven't seen it yet in the wild.

Unexpected pencil and paper test comeback

Already happening. My kid in high school has more tests and papers required to be hand-written this year.
And yes, TurnItIn legitimately caught him writing a paper with AI. Even the best kids make the stupid/lazy choice
When I was in college (2000-2004), we wrote our long papers on computers but we had what were called “blue books” for tests that were like mini notebooks. And many of the tests were basically, “Here is the topic. Write for up to an hour.”
And now my hand cramps if I write anything longer than a check. I can also type quickly enough that it basically matches the speed of my train of thoughts but actually writing cursive with a pen now, I get distracted and think, “Wait, how does a cursive capital ‘G’ go? Oh yeah. Hold on. What was I going to write?”
I pity the kids that have always typed for what their hands will go through on written tests
No way professors/TAs are going back to grading tests by hand.
- Naw, they'll use ocr
- Here (France) we still mostly grade by hand.

I have it write all my emails. I’m so productive and everyone loves them. That or they’re also using ChatGPT, and it’s just two computers flattering each other.

I had it write an operation manual for a client I particularly hate. Told it to make it sound condescending by dumbing it down just to the point where I could deny it. The first few times it just sounded like a 5th grade teacher talking to a kid while in a bad mood, but eventually it figured out if it just repeated itself enough it got the effect I wanted.
Things like: user is to disconnect power before attempting to repair. It is vital that the step of disconnecting power before attempting to repair is carried out.
I'm also sent long gpt generated documents and I summarise them in bullet points with gpt 4. Truly the future we all imagined (I learnt to take extra time to write a FAQ as an introduction to anything I write specifically because I know that they will gpt through the document, so I provide that stuff in advance)
What kind of emails are you sending to what kind of people, and how frequently that AI increases your productivity? I don't think I ever have emails that AI could do better or faster, since it'd probably take longer to explain to the AI what I need it to write than to type it out myself. Then again I'm in an engineering setting and it's pretty much just numbers, confirmations, basic requests, and issue descriptions, IT tickets, mostly

Machine learning tool used by people too lazy to do their actual job accuses everyone else of using machine learning tools.

Yeah that's pretty funny given the circumstances. "Our AI found your AI." Cool, so maybe none of this is working as intended. I'd be willing to bet nothing changes but the punishments for students.
Here's a clue:
If the paper isn't terrible, it was AI...
😋
- My junior year of high school, I had to take a summer math class. The teacher was super lazy (cool though) and gave us all the actual final with the answers as a study guide (multiple choice scantron). I mentioned, to my group of about 5 kids, that I was sure this was the actual final and I had a plan to write the answers down on a little piece of paper and hold up fingers casually so everyone could cheat. 1 for A, 2 for B, etc.
  Sure enough, on test day, it was the exact same test. I told everyone to take their time, don’t turn it in early, and ffs don’t get too many right. Everyone followed directions… except one. The moment I got done listing off the answers he stood up, walked over all proud, slapped it on the teachers desk, and started to walk out of the class.
  “Wait,” the teacher said, casually. They started to grade it. 100% correct.
  “You’ve got a C in the class and you expect me to believe you finished first and with every problem correct?”
  Murmurs and giggles filled the room and the teacher walked to the board. Wrote a question from the test on it and said, “solve it.”
  He failed, so he failed the final.
  I got a C on the test.

Someone posted to the class discussion form with the bit about being an ai bot still included.

I wish it was a joke.

I didn't do great in that class, but it was me getting 70% for not wanting to try and explain a mathematically concept in 500 words! They won't take that away from me.

I still have issues with such restrictions. I mean, why 500 words if you can explain it in 100?
- To force elaboration while staying on point. Details are just as important to writing as conciseness.
I had a student write me a chatgpt canned answer, prompt included.
- That's a good one. I once gave an assignment for students to write an original poem. One student submitted The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson and claimed it was his own. These were middle school kids so he didn't realize how famous the poem is. This shit has been happening forever. LLMs are another phase in the never-ending arms race between teachers and students who want to cheat.

And nothing of value was produced.

To be fair- that value didn't change much from pre ai.

Utterly unsurprising, given that very few students are actually interested in learning.

very few students are interested in what and how they're learning

no way!

I knew plenty of kids in high school that paid other kids to do their homework.

I know because I was one of the kids getting paid.

AI is just replacing good, ~~honest~~ work with machines.

And those papers get used as training data for next iteration of AI. Reinforcement learning!

Students? Even teachers are doing it...

“Likely “

Good. Academia lost its way anyways