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zahlmanyesterday at 8:22 PM2 repliesview on HN

I object to the idea that the LLM writing that these students are trying to distinguish themselves from, is actually good in the first place. Although students might well end up writing worse because people are trusting the detection of LLM content to other LLMs. (And really, it's bizarre that these massively complex systems required to produce roughly human-like output, apparently offer such simplistic reasoning for what they detect as non-human.)

Honestly, I lean towards shaming educators who do that. If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted. If that premise invalidates your assignment, change the assignment. It's not as if you're assigning this work to test the basic mechanics of writing (grammar, sentence/paragraph structure, parallelism, whatever) — I mean, how much of that did you consciously try to teach? My recollection is, not an awful lot; and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since I was in K-12 (and I went to pretty darn good K-12).


Replies

NewsaHackOyesterday at 8:26 PM

> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted.

But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.

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Unearned5161yesterday at 8:35 PM

The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.

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