Here I am, still shouting from the rooftops about “AI-detection” and why it’s so harmful to students

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2024-09-25 03:00:33

I’ve been working on a particularly distressing case recently, providing support in the appeals process to a student at another institution (which I am being careful not to name!) who was (I believe) falsely accused of submitting AI-generated work in one of their classes. Since I’ve been writing publicly about my opposition to the use of AI-detection tools, this student reached out to me for support. I’m going to try to describe here what I find so distressing about this case, without revealing any identifying details.

This student had been proactive about documenting their process, in part because they had read articles about how L2 writers (like them) are more likely to be falsely flagged as “AI”, and as a result, decided to screen-record themself writing their papers last semester in case that ever happened to them. One of those short papers got flagged by Turnitin as “30% AI” and was referred to the academic integrity office. I’ll note here that in the little corpus study I did last summer, which I gave a talk about at CCCCs this year, several of my old essays were flagged as “30% AI” by Turnitin’s detector; Turnitin even admits that the false positive rates are especially high for items flagged at “20%” or less, and while they are not very transparent about how they test these things, I suspect that “30%” isn’t much different on that front.

The academic integrity office wouldn’t accept the student’s screen-recording as evidence, because, they said, the student could have been transcribing from ChatGPT in another window; I’ve watched the whole almost 4 hour long video and y’all, it’s a bog-standard example of a student writing, deleting what they’ve written, writing it a different way, writing more stuff, going back to earlier stuff and changing it…exactly what I’d expect to see. (Also, 3+ hours of watching someone write is *boring*.) They also said that the student’s handwritten notes & and outline (which clearly connect to the final essay) could have been transcribed from ChatGPT, and rejected the student’s evidence demonstrating that the flagged paper was similar in terms of writing style, word choices, etc to ones they’d submitted that hadn’t been flagged; after all, the university argued, those essays could still have been AI generated. No, I’m not kidding, that’s literally the argument — I’ve seen the transcript of the meeting. It’s infuriating!