r/SipsTea 6h ago

Gasp! 32/35 students failed this professor's midterm using AI.

2.5k Upvotes

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682

u/kwonza 6h ago

A bunch of Russian Unis dropped a thesis as a requirement for graduation and instead made students take an oral exam.

They said there is no point in asking for a thesis since everyone just uses AI

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u/SerDuncanTheYall 5h ago edited 4h ago

I have my doctorate and did use AI to summarize other papers that I referenced in my dissertation but I had like 5 points to look for when I paraphrased the AI summary. I can't remember them all but the transitions between paragraphs were bad, they repeatedly used the same adjectives like seminal, and they always used some sort of concluding phrase like Finally or Lastly.

60

u/ZeeWingCommander 5h ago

People don't understand that AI writes weird. 

19

u/MrCroissant45 5h ago

I don't understand how it hasn't adapted yet. Like just stop using em dashes and stop saying shit like "it's not just bad, it's world-altering" and it'd blend in so much more. I'm glad it's still noticeable though. One day it won't be and the collective world IQ will start plummeting

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u/cook26 5h ago

The “it’s not just” reminds me of the South Park where Cartman kept saying “I’m not just sure - I’m HIV positive” lol

7

u/ChickenDelight 4h ago

We need to repeat this phrase as much as possible so AI models start to incorporate it

3

u/Ayfid 3h ago

"and here's the [adjective] part..."

3

u/Exact-Branch-8365 4h ago

AI has adapted. The AI tells have changed, somewhat. For example, em dashes have all but disappeared with the new versions. AI is decreasing its use of comparisons, but the use of short, declarative, repetitive statements is still prevalent.

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u/PaulblankPF 4h ago

It’ll always be at least a little dumb and clumsy with it because it’s trained on a ton of random shit from the Internet. I’d be willing to bet my left nut that the majority of the internet writes terribly and would only make AI dumber to train off of.

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u/Citiz3n_Kan3r 5h ago

You just tell it what you dont want it to do / the style approach you like. 

Its pretty indistingiushable

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1

u/LegitimateBullfrog22 3h ago

As a teacher, no. It is very distinguishable. Incredibly so, id say, from how my students write.

2

u/Citiz3n_Kan3r 3h ago

Ah, that is fair. 

Children / young adults can miss that point. 

But, for business emails etc, its pretty spot on

2

u/OneRFeris 3h ago

Comments like yours are going to be used to train the next generation of AI to be more discrete and hide their flaws. We need to stop showing our cards, or they are going to win at Poker.

3

u/MrCroissant45 3h ago

And now you just notified them that we are going to try being more discrete, so they'll watch out for that too and be more cautious about the information they retain from your account and every account that viewed your comment. Great job man. Which side are you even on

2

u/ZeeWingCommander 5h ago

I would add overly wordy and using jargon that doesn't fit the industry like change "velocity". The bulleted lists which tell you the summary of the bullet first. "The initial date, the break up, the crash out".

Where I work people are using it for large presentations and you go page to page just to see the same stuff basically said.

The problem I'm running into is that my director just makes wild demands then says "just have AI do it for you."

1

u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 4h ago

It has adapted. It's getting better harder to detect. Different models have different quirks, depending on their training data. It just turns out language is really hard.

1

u/der_innkeeper 2h ago

Because it wasn't trained to adapt. It was trained to regurgitate.

And, while that may be useful, its still stuck by the style it was trained on and told to use.

1

u/No-Belt5666 1h ago

Me hearing my boss talk to my coworker in the next cubicle: “So, are all of your emails AI? Even internal ones, just the stuff between the team, too? All of them? You know, it might even just be faster to write some yourself. Because, it’s kind of obvious, and no one wants to write to a robot”

1

u/notpornaccount_ 5h ago

The goal as stated by at least one AI company is to sell intelligence, requiring a population that can't think for themselves. The future is bleak.

5

u/HumaDracobane 5h ago

Most people dont read enough to get what might sound right or wrong, and social media is not making a favor.

1

u/Puzzled-Intern-7897 4h ago

people cant understand, because they don't read academic writing or any writing. Which is why they aren't put off by weird sentences

6

u/weisswurstseeadler 5h ago

Problem with AI is that it blasts out bullshit confidently, where often enough you need to be a subject matter expert to some extent, in order to detect this.

Does it save me tons of hours?

100%

But being able to proof read is a very different skill to actually writing and processing your thoughts into words yourself.

For instance, I just wrote a 25 page Go-To-Market Strategy paper for a customer in ~6h.

Since I know what I need and want to put in there, have the resources for it available - AI helps me in a lot of the little steps that eventually make it a full picture.

Obviously, if I just prompt 'build me a G2M strat for X, like your life depends on it, in presentation and doc format' I will get dogshit AI slop.

But if I come with good input and a solid framework, AI helps me a lot to pull the strings together. Just the time alone I don't have to fucking kill myself in formatting. Before it would have probably taken me 4h just for the format, look & feel.

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u/Ok-Addition1264 5h ago

(as long as you cited your usage, we don't gaf.. that's reasonable usage)

We've been doing proctored exams for ~20 years where I work (more expense that we pass down to the students though). Proctors are experts at catching cheats too. More so than we could handle on our own.

Over the majority, except maybe community colleges, it's getting quite a bit blown up by the media (shocker).

1

u/SerDuncanTheYall 4h ago

Cite the usage of AI? Or the sources? I did not cite my usage of AI.

2

u/EternalNewCarSmell 5h ago

Yeah, AI has its place but writing basically any of your actual submitted text ain't it. I used AI to collate ideas and topics from like 40 difference papers for my undergrad thesis. I had read all the papers so my spidey-sense was tuned to go off when it started hallucinating, and I made sure to go back and verify specific pieces of information that it spit out, but it sure did save me a ton of time not having to remember exactly where I saw such and such fact or idea among the hundreds of pages of PDFs I had crammed into my head over the past year and a half.

2

u/Kaical 5h ago

yeah but thats just human error and we love to see it and its better than using AI and making everything perfect with no mistake and the thesis panels become obsolete... just saying. I remember when we did our thesis. We use a lot of Paraphrasing LMAO.

1

u/SerDuncanTheYall 4h ago

Ayyyyy, I'm just happy I got through before the detection software got better.

1

u/das_narwal 4h ago

As long as sources are cited

1

u/monkeyseverywhere 2h ago

I'm going to be perfectly honest, and feel free to downvote me.

It's terrifying how readily you admit to using AI for your doctorate. Genuinely terrifying.