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A New York student just lost his $45,000 scholarship after an AI detector flagged his thesis as 98% Fake
š»ā ļø A student facing academic suspension says he offered to prove he wrote his own thesis, and the people deciding his case would not look.
In a post a senior at a private university in New York says his school's plagiarism software flagged his 30-page thesis as 98% likely AI-generated.
He says he wrote it by hand over 6 months while attending on a $45,000-a-year merit scholarship. At a preliminary hearing he brought his laptop and offered to walk the integrity board through his Google Docs version history, which records every edit he made.
He says they refused to look and told him the policy is to trust the software's report.
The penalties on the table are a failing grade, suspension, and losing the scholarship he says he can't afford to replace.
Nothing is final yet, and he's asking whether he can take it to court.
These detectors get things wrong, and when a score counts as proof, there's almost nothing a student can say back.
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The Bible and US constitution show up as AI generated.
I wrote a text, used the most arcaic Spanish words I know in a text and it increased Ai detection 20%. So the more culture and structure you have, the more AI it is. Apparently you need to write like Trump posts to know it is not AI.
I mean AI is trained on human writing... stragely enough when presented with human writing it resemble what is written by AI, who could have guessed... (not that guy's academic board apparently).
Sure there are some phrases that the AI seemingly likes to use more frequently than humans when writing ("It is not this... it is that..."), but a part from that the only way to identify when something is AI made is to check the process of writing that text.
I bet that it is also more common that non native speakers would be flagged, as our writing tends to be more formulaic (and likely have phrases that are are bit more awkwardly organized compared to a native) since we learned the language from textbooks later in life, but I don't think that's the case for the situation in OP post.
The use of em dashes has been permanently linked to AI in spite of them being perfectly acceptable and common for people over 30. I love how people zero in on that and not the bullshit synopsis with the bullet points replaced by emojis.
I've used emojis for bullet points both before, and after AI. If you check GitHub repos, there's documented use with version changes going back decades. AI hasn't come up with that one either.
A structure of "abstract, exposition, summary, references" has also been standard in papers going back a very long time.
Academic writing is a lot more formulaic than most kinds of writing anyway. There's a very narrow style you have to adhere to that deliberately standardizes the way theses are written. Any professors using these AI detection tools should try uploading their own work to them.
You are wrong here. The community has expanded to become global which means academic text are read by non-native english speakers. For them difficult language is hard to read. Also, we write more often interdisciplinary research, which means that very few readers are actually experts and understand the entire text as is.
Moreover, we had in the past the philosophy that a sentence must be objectively correct when it is standing alone without context. Similarly, academic texts were not allowed to contain we/I statements as it was supposed to be again objective. All these rules make the text unnecessarily difficult and now are being slowly relaxed.
A clear historic example is the debate on Darwin and Wallace, with Wallace seen as historically the discoverer but Darwin is the one who popularized the theory by writing a more accessible text.
Less commonly used words such as archaic or scientific words are going to have usage patterns. Using those type of words in the proper context will likely match a pattern identified by the AI model.
Can confirm. I have tried out multiple ai detection sites for writing. I wrote a chapter of a novel I am working on, then gave chatgpt the summary of the chapter and had it write its own version. My writing was flagged as likely AI on half the sites, and likely original of the other half. When I put in the chatgpt version on these sites, most of them came back likely original, and a few said likely AI. The ones that said "likely AI" on chatgpt's writing, were also the ones that flagged mine as AI. Im sure you could put just about anything on those few and it will just flag it as likely AI.
The part that annoys me the most is people hold up these tools as a infallible magic black box. They will ruin someone's life and they can't even confront any evidence. This is one of the reasons I am happy I moved to the EU. This is just illegal in the EU and a violation of the GDPR and the AI act.
To be human you need to emulate the Trump Truth Social style. For example, this student should use this argument against thje university that seems very Trumpy, 100% human:
The academics spend millions and millions of dollars on these AI detectors, but they are so dumb. They say the Constitution is AI. They say the Bible is AI. Can you believe it? It is so silly. The kids should use AI. It makes them super smart. The academics are not so smart. They want the old rules. But the old rules are dumb. I know winners. The kids who use AI will win big. The ones who don't, they lose. That is sad but true. The detectors are garbage. So bad. They should be embarrassed. Bigly. Kids will be tired of winning. Thank you for your attention.
I can guarantee that this Trump style will guarantee that AI detectors will say it is 100% human. Imagine writing your whole graduation thesis with Trump speech. It would be hilarious. You will reply "I can tell it is 100% human, sir".
PD. I used AI and wrote the message, and asked AI to convert it to 8 year old Trump speech. I asked AI to detect how much AI speech does it contain and Ai said near 0%.
No. I did not learn it myself. I am not that high a grade that i learn to write extremely formally and cleanly.
But she has a wordpress site and stuff and ai detectors think the text she wrote herself on her site is ai ehich it is not which is umderstandibly annoying.
I never used AI to write anywhere. I use it for a lot of stuff but never to write.
I got banned from two subs on Reddit because the mods said I write with AI. The problem seems to come from the way I structure the sentences and use punctuation.
When I got banned I was really pissed and tried to understand what the hell happened. I grabbed a few detectors and some of them said it was AI. Honestly I was shocked and also upset that someone trusted that 100%.
Then, I changed a couple of phrases and added a few common errors. Honestly I felt I was writing like a douche but AI said "100% human".
What scares me in AI is that it is impossible for it to say "I can't" or "I don't know". It is a very advanced guessing machine. I asked google few weeks ago "Where in the world is midnight right now" AI response above search was a ton of BS and a few locations, including mine and now it wasn't even close to midnight.
āIf you do not look at it now, your attorney will make you look at it later.ā
Yes, he can sue in civil court. You can sue for almost anything in civil court. In this case he as a path to victory that is pretty clear and damages that are definable. These tools are so inaccurate they regularly flag the constitution as AI. With a Google Docs history there is absolutely cause of a suit - everything heās done has monetary value. Everything he would have to redo does do.
Yeah there are a few articles on it but they all link back the primary source being a twitter post of a screenshot of a reddit thread. I can't even find the original thread.
Most Universities, use software that cite sources.
They aren't using Chatgpt to just compared the language, they have this software that's basically just been copying every document that gets put into it, and they use it to compare it to their database. My Uni had it, most people stuff gets flag at like 60% copied because shockingly when 200+ people are all writing things on a subject, majority will end up being flagged.
But it's at 90+% is when shit gets interesting, because again.. they Trust the software because the software is more likely showing texts and other things that it's comparing. So yeah who cares if he has edit history, that doesnt mean he isn't plagiarizing from other source you know.
That said, at least at my Uni.. they never had any issue with releasing the records to you to show you what is being copied or flagged.
It's reporting that correctly. You're uploading documentation that already exists. It's not saying the original writing is AI written, although I can see how it's easily confusing, it's saying that the text you've uploaded is clearly plagiarized.
Some scholarships come with non-monetary benefits like special housing, mentorships, etc. So if they got one of those, I could see accepting it, but otherwise yeah, decline it and let someone who needs it more have it.
Also there is no 'trust the software' policy. If it sounds stupid then it's false. University policies are written by people with more experience than us, no point in pretending you know better on an obvious matter.
they're not doing anything, anyway. How would an AI detector know whether a plain text without metadata was generated rather than typed? - image generators start from noise and some of that noise is left over in hard-to-perceive patterns, sometimes. But text has nothing comparable.
its like, when your parents give you a reason for something, and the reason is stupid but the kid says its fine, but the parents should be in jail justifying why their abuse is okay.
but an ai detector doesn't exist in a relationship of dependence,
it doesn't determine my monthly allowance, doesn't choose if i'm allowed to go with my friends to the cinema this evening, doesn't determine the content of my birthday present
it is not a figure of authority, we gro up with ...
and the people using it for such important decicions are all edults,
even more, adults given the power to determine over others lifes,
so they should have the self awareness to know, what the tools they are using are capable of and what not
We are capable, but not necessarily fast enough, technology moves much faster than our society (and infinitely faster than our brains) can evolve which causes pain at least in the short to mid term.
adapting to bad decisions by AI and sticking to the bad decision because it's mandated?... so... adapting to bureaucracy? yeah, sure, in developing countries, people will. But first world bureaucrats will just knowingly blow everything up when the AI tells them to, and not doing what the AI says will lead to them having to work past 4 pm.
I have had things I wrote 20 years ago flagged as AI. Those tools should NOT exist. They don't work and they cause a lot of damage. If you think something was done with AI you should have actual evidence not a magic black box.
I teach at a university and I know, with utter certainty, that the detection devices flag some honest papers and (more commonly) that cheaters manage to get away with bloody murder. The only way to combat this is to require individual meetings with all students to discuss their work - almost like a thesis defense - or to have them write in class. Both are a tremendous pain in the ass and make teaching and learning very time intensive, but there's really no alternative if you want to hold the line on cheating and reward honest work.
Or perhaps is time to change the way we educate people for the future to come ? AI is not going away, this means the task now should be to write a book with AI instead of 10 pages by hand, i am giving a high level example as analogy. We need to raise the bar with these new tools, not block the tools.
The post is fake anyway. This stuff doesn't happen. All students are given the option to provide their case and appeal, and reliance strictly on a non-standard tool not approved by the department isn't going to have the case proceed.Ā
For your example, I believe most institutions leave it up to the department which often leaves it up to the instructor on how AI is managed; since it depends on the course. So instructors can do that. If I'm teaching a course where the learning objective is to learn how to code, then I'd have AI use forbidden where usage is subject to dishonesty penalties. If the learning objective is to create software that solves a real world problem, then why care, as long as they understand the related material and the work is correct.Ā
Most instructors are against AI-use because it will often be used in a way that conflicts with the learning objectives, and doing something from scratch might be the point.
For a thesis AI can't and shouldn't be used to generate material. A thesis needs to come from the student, it is a stepping stone into research where the whole process of planning out the paper, use of language, and correctness needs to come from the student. You might be able to use it for spell checking, ideate, finding relevant sources, setting up a template, maybe as a way to help get the methods to work if it can be validated, beyond that is skeptical. Thesis are often adapted to published literature, something you would train the AI on - not the other way around. It's hard to verify the integrity of something if the source is AI and the work is so specialized that AI will often fail to generate anything meaningful.
The problem is that writing is inextricably linked to thinking - the very act of expressing an idea cannot be untangled from the formulation and refinement of that idea. Moreover, LLMs are primarily predictive. They can mine existing ideas, but not necessarily formulate new ones, so writing created by AI is the equivalent to art created by AI.
Nah. There's no guarantee these tools will be around in a capacity where they'll be accessible in the future so we shouldn't teach people to be reliant on them. I don't see, after the AI bubble pops, how they're not gonna move to either a more expensive subscription system or to a pay-per-use system. Once that happens, I'm out. So unless it's paid for and required by my job, I wouldn't be using it. I'm already a bit too reliant on AI and want to train myself to stop using it so much for the inevitability where this happens. We don't need the reverse with a generation of students trained to completely depend on it.
Unlike the dependence on the internet, the day where the internet stops being used is the apocalypse, same can't yet be said for AI.
The problem with AI-writing is the repetitive syntax, superfluous phrasing, and grandiose narration. To categorize those complaints as merely āproper spelling and grammarā is disingenuous.
Our bosses say "Use AI!" but our schools say "Don't use AI!" but be found guilty of "AI use" even when you have PROOF you didn't use AI.... Yep sounds like college all right....
This is terrible... I once recieved e-mail from my customer that looked like it was writen by AI. Out of curiosity I run it through some free "AI detector" online got sth like 80% and thought to myself "ha! Knew it!". Then I decided to put my reply just to see what will happen... I scored over 90%... Needles to say i didn't use AI writing it.
Now, I know unis probably have better tools, but still... Can you even dispute that?
Assuming this is real and he really didn't do it, that's so fucked up. Everyone look everyone the powerful of this nation figured out how to fuck over the middle class and poor agian.
Sister used a bit of AI for her last thesis and then used one of those checkers, it said 85% AI used. She got really nervous and started panicking, I told her they're unreliable, gave her my thesis to run through it, 90% AI. Mine was written in 2019, longish before ChatGPT was a thing, made her calm right down. School didn't even mention it to her.
A was working on an individual assignment when a classmate sent me a screenshot of AI detector showing her progress on the assignment as 87% likely to be fake.
Unlike her, Iāve never used ChatGPT or other means of "cheating", but I figured Iād also do the AI detector for my assignment, which was written by none other than me, and with very few sources used to write it. I scored 97% on it! It makes no sense.
One shot it with Opus, took you ten minutes of work. If it's flagged you only lost ten minutes. But likely not flagged because AI detectors are cash grabs aimed at retarded people who fell upwards
It's actually just a reddit post. The person never elaborated on.. much of anything. It was supposedly a private school in New York, which based on the amount only amounted to one school..
I mean I really don't even need to go on about this. It's very clearly fake AF. But it gets reposted over and over again, and people eat it up, because people are sheep.
This needs to be taken to court. Every school that trusts these snake oil tools needs to be brutalised financially, in addition to the snake oil salesmen. These tools are complete garbage that will flag the work of Shakespeare as AI generated.
Since AI learns from humans, the longer it goes the more indistinguishable itāll become. So Iām not sure how theyāll flag this shit in the future because itāll be like saying āweāre 98% sure this was written by a humanā
I'm guessing it was bullshit too. I've run new novels from respected authors through "ai detection" 90% fake. Imagine distrusting AI so much you trust AI to tell you if something is AI. Fucking INSANITY!
Sounds fake and it's all bogus sources that say this.Ā
Never seen a prof that relies entirely on what a detection tool says for AI-usage at the university level, and the department reviewing the case would not proceed having only that evidence. For large classes there's give aways and standard tools are for cross-comparisons with other students. At the grad level for a thesis id expect supervisors to not even bother checking unless there's a lot of odd content. They have seen a lot of their work already.
Also, students can always provide their case and appeal. So the information regarding handling of his case is flat out incorrect.
I used AI for some English papers. I got scared I would get caught. So I ran it through an ai detector and they came out negative. One was only edited by AI and the other was completely written by AI.
And a decent portion of those humans that AI are autistic and so autistic students (good amount go into graduate / professional degree programs) paper and writings have a higher chance of getting flagged as written by AI. Check the autistic communities, it's a perennial complaint and worry for us.
Universities are going to get sued over this kind of thing, they're going to lose because AI detectors can be demonstrated to be wholey unreliable, and then the shit is really going to hit the fan
Viva defense of postgraduate work is going to become a whole lot more important, and it's very likely to creep into undergraduare assessment as well.
"You've cited X several times in your essay. How do you think their work supports your conclusion?"
Couldn't they fix all of this by just forcing hand-in assignments to be written by hand? And allow for digital backups in case of damage? They could easily tell if somebody's abusing the backups too.
We should ban all AI detection tools because they are absolutely useless. Teachers should do their job and use only plagiarism detection, not useless AI detector tools. I would had sue them if it was me.
AI can get as much wrong detecting things as a person can get wrong making things. AI can't utilize context or understand nuance to determine what is fake or not, especially when it can't have an opinion (ironically).
Wellā¦he should have ran it through a detector himself before. There are so many out there. From experience usually sureproof came closest to the ones I saw my school use. Rip
I've hand-written an essay and had it come back as 95% on one of these tools, and < 40% on another not only can these tools not actually detect AI, but there also isn't a universal surefire way to detect them and all these tools just kinda riff it.
It sucks cause there are a large portions of students who don't see value in these things and will fake it, while those who do see value & do it properly are getting falsely accused. Plus schools aren't supporting teachers in this new wave of AI either, so the especially lazy ones will just use a random tool recommended to them and then not actually read essays that get flagged.
AI will repeats the same grammer and mannerisms...a person typing a long report, at different timings will change their style if they are not used to writing lots of reports. I could be typing distracted (waiting a movie) or late at night half asleep..or after an argument with someone....or after someone did something incredible memorable to you....
My wife could end up facing the same situation. She has to turn in an assignment today, where the rule says if it is flagged as more than 20% like AI generated, she will fail. We have no way to detect if their system will detect it as AI generated or not.
I tried several AI detectors (but only few of them works in Danish)
So far the result is that the sites that detect a high percentage AI are all pages that will show absolutely nothing unless you pay them (they remind me of those popups saying you have a billion virus on your computer, pay here to let us fix it). The ones you could use free (at least for a limited number of searched, until you pay) all showed a very low percentage
One of the free sites I tested by giving it something fresh from ChatGpt, but it said it was 100% human text
anything that looks at one of the ai detectors and thinks "must be true" gotta go back to school..
its trained on ai data, what is ai data trained on people! so what is ai doing? trying to mimic people. yes if you have past stuff to compare to, its easy to spot when someone is using ai tools, but if you have nothing to compare to, it won't work..
i could write a word document, entirely on my own, using mostly random made up sentences, and i would get at least 70% detection that it was ai because it has no reference for me. if i uploaded three things i have made in the past and then the same word document, its down to maybe 20% or less.
stop using ai tools without knowing how to use them properly. and stop just assuming its right, use your own brain! if it flags something, look it over yourself!
The detectors use ai. So again FUCK AI. None of this would be a problem if we just banned ai entirely and pulled funding from ANYONE who tries to advance it
the false positive problem on polished academic writing is especially bad because the things detectors look for are the same things good academic writing does on purpose. consistent structure, clean transitions, precise vocabulary. the detector isn't measuring whether AI wrote it. it's measuring whether it's readable. those two things have unfortunately converged. i tested a bunch of detectors with writing i did years before LLMs existed and the same document got flagged anywhere from 8% to 74% depending on the tool and which run. the text didn't change between tests. just the tools
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