Hundreds of UK Students Under Investigation for Cheating with AI Text-Generators

Plus, executives say AI will be detectible "forever." Plus, International Quick Bites.

Jul 06, 2023

Issue 222

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Hundreds of UK Students Under Investigation for AI Cheating

The Tab has a story out this week on - what else? - college students using ChatGPT to cheat. The site says their inquiries:

reveal more than 40 per cent of UK universities have investigated students for using AI bots like ChatGPT to cheat in their assessments

All this tells me, frankly, is that more than half of UK universities are not interested in finding this kind of cheating. There’s no question it’s there. There’s only one reason they’re not finding it.

In any case, the numbers from The Tab inquiry are that:

almost 400 students (at least 377) have faced investigations for using AI chatbots in a university-assessed piece of work and at least 146 have so far been found guilty, with dozens of investigations still ongoing.
The figure was highest at the University of Kent where 47 students have been investigated for using ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot.

It continues:

The full number of university students who have used ChatGPT to cheat in their assessments is likely to be even higher with numerous universities telling The Tab it didn’t hold the data centrally and to extract this information from every university department would be too costly.
One university feared by admitting its own figures, it could potentially damage its reputation

The full number is absolutely higher. That, as one may say, is not an iceberg. That is the tip of the iceberg.

And though it usually surfaces as an American problem, it is universal that schools are invested in minimizing or discounting cheating. Not holding the data centrally, is weak. Very weak. And if that’s the case, if the school simply does not know how much collective cheating is being reported, university leaders cannot make any informed policy decisions.

The story quotes professors and others who say the AI writing is of poor quality and one expert who says ChatGPT is “almost configured for cheating.” I’m not sure the “almost” is needed.

Then unfortunately, after sharing some good numbers, The Tab story wanders into the nonsense about the dangers of “false positive” indications from AI similarity detection systems - how they can be “ruining people’s lives.” Which, if used correctly, is nonsense.

Still, The Tab is correct in their headline - cheating with AI text bots is common and widespread. In the U.K., in just one semester, and in what is certain to be a massive undercount, hundreds of students have been nabbed. Hundreds. Again, this is not an iceberg.

AI Detection Industry “Booming”

The Guardian has a pretty decent article out recently about the rise in AI cheating as well as the companies building and selling products to detect text that’s been produced by non-humans.

It focuses on two companies - Winston AI, which I do not know, and Turnitin.

The head at Winston told The Guardian:

the company saw a surge of interest in the wake of ChatGPT: “It all happened within a week or two – suddenly we couldn’t keep up with demand.”

What’s interesting about this article is that executives at both companies say that AI will be detectable indefinitely. That’s news to me.

Winston’s exec said:

With predictive AI, we’ll always be able to build a model to predict it

Turnitin’s exec said:

We think there will always be a tell

Both said “always.” Like I said, interesting.

In India, press reports that police in one state have used AI facial recognition software to arrest 87 people for suspected exam cheating. Many of the arrests were of “solvers” who took exams in place of actual students.
In Kenya, media reports that members of parliament have accused two state agencies of “abetting exam cheating by shielding perpetrators.” The complaints are that despite frequent reports of major cheating, no arrests have been made.
Media in Bosnia and Herzegovina report that on a very popular website, “there are several advertisements for doing seminar papers, graduation, diploma, research, or master’s theses.” The paper says that, despite people knowing this is cheating, there is not much that can be done because, “Academic misconduct, however, is not a criminal offense.”
In Nigeria, news reports that some 20 school officials were arrested for “aiding examination malpractice.”
In Algeria, for the sixth year in a row, the country has turned off the Internet to prevent exam cheating. The education minister told the paper, “We realise a blackout is a big step. But we can't just do nothing."