Simple Known Dangers with AI, and Possible Future Dangers Too.

[fox]

I would have said in the past, that an essay is a good way to evaluate a person's ability to use information creatively to tell a story or test a hypothesis. But in one of the courses I taught called Fisheries Assessment and Management, I learned before the days of AI that it was too easy to plagiarize an essay on a relevant topic - from past ones written, from other students, or buy purchasing one online. After awhile I felt that I no longer had the ability to catch these violations, and which ones I caught was just a matter of luck. (Most of the cheating I caught in this course was from students lifting paragraphs from published papers, not the other kinds of plagiarism mentioned above.) So I came up with a creative way to issue the assignment that would be much, much harder to plagiarize or buy. I called it "advances in ....". You would take a fisheries topic, identify five relatively recent advances in the science around that topic, indicate why they were; advances, and review the five published papers where the advances came from. The paper also had to summarize the state of the art on that topic. It worked very well and probably cut the rate of plagiarism to zero or near zero. But I'm not sure that AI couldn't handle this; I never had to find out.

[Jason]

The paper also had to summarize the state of the art on that topic. It worked very well and probably cut the rate of plagiarism to zero or near zero. But I'm not sure that AI couldn't handle this; I never had to find out.

Unfortunately, that is one of the things that AI is excellent at. What it wouldn't be good at is writing the essay in the student's voice. But unless you have your students writing several essays and you don't have too many students or an amazing memory, that would be hard to pick up on, I'd imagine. But, AI does format its answers in a particular fashion, and if you use it enough, you might pick up on its voice. Handing out take-home assignments for high school teachers must be particularly awful. I would bet that more students are using it to cheat than at the university level. Could be wrong, though.

Have you used any AI bots, Fox? I've used ChatGPT occasionally but not the others. I did use Grok recently to ask if it was still racist. If you don't understand why I asked that, check some recent US news having to do with Elon Musk and Grok. The answers seemed to be too "woke," so Elon Musk made some changes to fix that, and the bot started acting racist with positive comments about Hitler. You'd have to read them yourself. I don't want to offend anyone.