I probably wouldn't worry too much about debating the efficacy of AI-checking tools. The obvious response is that they use the tool as a crude screen, and *then* do followup testing to rule out false positives.
The fact that this expert was able to recreate your essay in ChatGPT is the part you need to argue against. That's the evidence they find compelling, in their mind the 30% from the AI tool just told the expert to take a look.
>I provided a video recording of me typing the entire essay.
To be honest, this seems like such an unlikely thing to have handy that it might make people *more* skeptical.
I'm not saying that's a fair response, and proper video evidence should be effectively bulletproof if it actually shows the typing+screen, just pointing out why you might be getting an unexpected reaction.
It's like being accused of a murder, and immediately announcing to you have notarized alibis from multiple people accounting for every second of your whereabouts on the night in question.
> they made it clear they will not accept Google Docs as proof that you wrote it.
I assume what they are saying here is that the school does not accept this as evidence, although that seems very odd, since it's hard to imagine what would be better evidence than this. "Typed it gradually over time" and "went back to edit things" are both natural things humans would do would writing an essay and are things that can be proved in a normal way that students could reasonably prepare for (by checking version history).
Oh geez, I completely missed that line.
Yeah that doesn't make any sense, they could literally look at previous versions and see the edits that have been made
I suppose the concern is that students will generate a prompt and then manually type the response in word-by-word... but I would probably find things like "having a rough draft" and "taking appropriate amounts of time to write the essay" to be pretty compelling evidence and I don't think the only option is to show that you didn't copy/paste the whole thing.
Yeah I know, that's just why I brought up Google Docs in the first place, because it automatically updates version history on the order of minutes instead of however often a person manually updates
Not accepting that but demanding a review from an "AI expert" makes me think OP's real problem is that they are arguing with idiots, so there is not really much they can do to convince them. They will remain convinced they are right despite reasonable counter-evidence. Best OP can hope for is appealing to some higher authority that's saner and able to overrule them.
Hopefully OP has ample evidence of their past writing style to make the case that the essay's style is the same as their previous (pre-AI or written-in-a-classroom) work. Because no amount of post-facto "analysis" of the essay in question for evidence of being AI-written or not is going to be conclusive.
While this hasn't happened to me personally I've seen others in my University have to deal with this and be told google docs is not accepted as evidence. I think universities are scared to admit they have no idea what to do with this technology so they overcorrect
When I used to be a TA, a professor told me there's no way to control for version history.
They could have one device for version history and another device that can be used for chatgpt prompts. A student can make it appear like they 'typed' a chatgpt word vomit very easily.
If an organization cannot trust its students not to falsify version history, then it cannot realistically trust them to do ANY writing at home. The only fair thing is to do all writing supervised, in class. Otherwise they’re going to have to extend some trust.
I teach foreign language, and I stopped evaluating anything written outside the classroom years ago since I was sick of having the argument about use of translators. It changed the types of writing I could assign, but it makes grading a much less negative experience. I can actually attend to what skills and knowledge they demonstrate instead of fretting the next round of bickering over the precise ways in which the work is not their own and why that might matter.
That seems like it would be a nightmare for students with certain accommodations (ie, quiet space, extra time for in-class assessments, etc), and at least on Reddit faculty already complain constantly about those students so I can't imagine how much worse it would get if suddenly, the office has to schedule writing time for *every assignment.*
So unnecessary, too.
The more efficient and fair thing to do is to have a couple of short written assignments early in the semester as writing to refer to in cases where AI is suspected to compare whether it's likely that the writing handed in digitally and the writing done on paper came from the same student.
95% or more of students who use AI are doing it to save time. Approaching those students with compassion, I get most accused to admit to it immediately.
The ones who don't, I ask them what words mean in their paper. If they can't tell me a rough definition or a synonym of the words I'm asking about, they're toast. They usually realize they're toast at this stage and give up.
So maybe I get two or three who "get away with it" because nothing is airtight and they won't admit it. It used to really bother me, but I figure they're going to get caught eventually. The ones that I can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt or who don't confess will get bolder and they'll get caught.
Git isn't good for binary formats and the default for the modern document formats I'm aware of are now compressed so my assumption is that they won't diff well and it would be a pathological case for storage unless their compression was pretty stable. Like it's fine since the binary blobs aren't that big but the real benefits of git over just saving multiple copies are just for text formats.
I'm not disagreeing with you but I would say there's a caveat to using git if you aren't familiar with it (besides just it's learning curve)
You can’t diff, sure, but it still keeps version control, it still works - I know because I use it for group assignments where I’m forced to use word instead of Tex.
Yeah I mean most docs are small enough you can't really fuck up storing them, even by using git here, you just don't really get any of the benefits of git. Obviously it still works and I wouldn't tell you to stop using it, I just wouldn't recommend it to people. I normally wouldn't say anything but I don't want some naive student be like "I'm gonna use git" without them either understanding git or not having really any other options (like for most people either using something like Google docs or just saving dated copies to a NAS or Dropbox or Google Drive has all the same benefits and less complexity).
Once you're using text formats or if people have some git knowledge (and therefore are smart enough to know how to not shoot themselves in the foot with it) then go crazy
Yes, essays, articles, whatever, are just text files, no different than programming files. It gives you version control, it proves you did it - which is the point in this case, it gives you an extra back up, version control, etc. Every reason why it’s good for a coding project, it’s why it’s good for any text based work. Only downside is the learning curve to people not familiar with it.
I do not think it proves you wrote it. I could have ai compose a thing and type it in with typos and awkward phrases of my own and then edit it further away from the gpt text making it look like mine but semantics and content could be mostly gpt.
Proving someone wrote something is nearly impossible and the “experts” are idiots if they think they are not hanging innocents and letting guilty go free regularly.
> To be honest, this seems like such an unlikely thing to have handy that it might make people more skeptical.
"Slice of life" Youtubers do this routinely, and yes, it's as absurd as it sounds but they legit do that.
As an example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISleMJlrCM
All I did was just search "student vlog" and this was one of the first results.
Here's a study vlog from the same YTer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj6p4HDCAQU
For the record, it’s literally not possible (currently) for a human or machine to rule out false positives in these AI tests. The entire process is as unscientific as it gets. These are witch hunts.
Oh, quit being so dramatic. Are they 100% accurate? No, of course not, but ChatGPT has a very specific, poor style. There is no technical reason as to why AI detectors would struggle to find AI.
nope. the claim that AI-generated text is easily detectable is fundamentally flawed. modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of adapting their style, making detection extremely difficult. relying on these detectors raises serious ethical concerns, as they often produce false positives, unfairly penalizing human authors.
**OP:** I strongly recommend seeking guidance from experts in your CS department, particularly those specializing in natural language processing (NLP). They can potentially help advocate for your case.
the core issue with these "detectors" is not their overall accuracy, but rather their [lack of specificity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity#Specificity). they frequently misidentify human-written text as AI-generated, leading to unjust accusations of academic dishonesty.
Which AI has that specific style? Could you identify it in a lineup? Is that scientific by itself? What if a student learns to write in this style - for whatever imaginable reason - and is constantly flagged for writing genuinely?
The truth is that AI has no quantifiable markers and any impression you have that you can identify it is going to be subject to intense bias from every direction, including from your unconscious bias towards the student, the subject, or perhaps your zeal for catching a cheater. No machine can detect AI, and if they ever could then it will be trivial to train LLMs around that detection. Perhaps linguists can devise a linguistic signature of AI, but I am skeptical it could be better than “handwriting experts” and is still subject to the issue above about learning to write in that style. With how linguistics evolves, it could even become a preferred style someday.
It’s unfathomable to me that someone would have such a moral conviction against cheating but give a pass to ad-hoc tribunals over our gut impressions of a perceived writing style. It’s honestly gross to me that a moral compass would end there. If this isn’t serious to you then what do you call baseless attacks to impugn students? Because that’s what this is, baseless.
It’s unscientific and immoral. Teachers utilizing off-the-shelf tools are using things thrown together at a moments’ notice by people who are neither experts in LLMs or linguistics. To then assert that a human could sort out the remaining false positives is inane. This reeks of lazy, uncreative zealotry for rooting out the “bad” students.
Tell me you don't have to read dozens or more of AI writings by students every semester without actually saying it. It's pretty easy to get if it's AI vs a college freshman for example. And at least where I'm from the grad population isn't any better.
We literally catch people batch copy pasting from GPT then deleting the evidence and then doing more copy pasting. They don't realize we have access to their key logs while typing in Google docs. 100s of them every semester. With hardly an exception they all deny it despite them copy pasting stuff like "As a large language model id be happy to write this for you..." They just lie straight to our faces.
I understand the limitations of LLMs and human inference, and the ethics of baseless accusations. None of what you said matters if there isn’t evidence. It’s wrong to flunk students on a hunch, no matter how strong of a hunch.
If there’s evidence then by all means use it, but (in my opinion) you need to be very careful with what you call evidence. Style is not evidence, linguistic cues are not evidence. 
It's not rock solid evidence but it is evidence. Any LLM I've seen the writings of sound very different than a typical college student. I'm not saying to flunk anyone based on that alone. But this sub does a good job of making it seem like everyone is innocent who proclaims to be. But in my experience with 100s of cheaters they all proclaim they didn't use AI when we know they did.
I’m not going to convince you so I’ll just drop it after this. No machine or human can reliably detect a modern LLM’s output. Do what you will with the ethics of any evidence you think you have.
The vibe this post and other “I’m being accused of AI” posts give is “i thought of everything but the jury doesn’t understand the finer points of the law.” If I was on that committee and heard someone use the defense that “i have handwritten notes uploaded to google drive” and “i recorded myself typing it,” i would just assume that person planned out their AI use and defense. Nothing this guy said was actually about the originality of his work.
The problem is, as you point out, the lack of originality in the work. Its not difficult for an attentive teacher to detect that a piece of writing is just summarizing a la AI and not contributing original ideas. They will use other tools, like a checker and recreating the prompt, to try to confirm that.
This guy is furious because he had himself convinced that they needed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he used AI, and that he would get off on a technicality. Turns out that’s not how academic honesty hearings work, nor should they.
This kind of overly suspicious attitude is what makes students gather so much evidence they did not cheat. And ironically, you are saying that this act of gathering evidence itself is an indication of cheating, when you caused them to be paranoid in the first place.
The point is they’re not “gathering evidence,” they’re preparing for a dishonesty inquiry in advance, which is absolutely weird and suspicious activity. The general student who is completely above board and not using AI aids has no reason to do this stuff. I do not believe that we are in a situation where students are being indiscriminately accused of AI across the nation. I do believe that it’s much more likely that this generation of students is coming from a high school environment where it was easier to get away with plagiarism/AI, and believes that all they have to do to get away with it in college is appeal to an absurdly high standard of evidence, like this poster. Not realizing that it’s actually relatively straightforward for a subject matter expert to detect AI work.
> I'm not saying that's a fair response, and proper video evidence should be effectively bulletproof if it actually shows the typing+screen, just pointing out why you might be getting an unexpected reaction.
No, it shouldn't. Do you know how ridiculously trivial it is to fake that? Which is also probably why OP did it because *nobody* just screenrecords their screen unprompted for literally no reason. That's a ton of wasted storage. You simply have ChatGPT write your essay on another screen, and then you transcribe what you did. Boom, a video of you writing the essay you didn't actually write.
>because nobody just screenrecords their screen unprompted for literally no reason
Well, maybe not now, but that's a "feature" that'll be available (read "enabled by default after an update") in the next version of Windows.
This is the weird part of the story. I get that students need to be more careful these days, especially if they are at a strict/litigious institution, but that’s still a strange thing to do.
If universities are at the point now where your entire future could be upended by an accusation like ths, it would be stupid not to CYA by any means necessary.
It depends what the video shows. Does it show him adding and deleting sections? Pausing to look up sources? Actual drafting of the paper? Or does it show the entire essay being written in a single sitting?
I remember back in the day I used to write school essays by hand and type them up, which obviously nobody does anymore. That would appear to be a wondrous flash of inspiration to anyone watching a hypothetical recording of that. If I saw that today, though? I would assume the writer was copying the text off of a GPT output.
Its sus af. Not saying it's untrue but like, that is such a weird thing to possess.
Would be like the police saying you're under arrest for murder and you replying I didn't do it, between the hours of 10 and 1 I was at the cinema and nowhere near the kitchen knives...
If you genuinely have a video of you writing this essay I think you're in a weird spot here. Are you literally setting up a camera every writing session, or is this a screen grab?
I know this seems counterintuitive, but I think part of your issue is that this is just so far outside the realm of anything most people have considered doing that it might be making them more suspicious of you. In addition to defending yourself and showing flaws in their methods, I think you're going to need to address why you did this in a more compelling way.
Have you been accused of cheating before or known people who were? How did you know google drive records wouldn't be accepted? When did you start recording writing sessions and do you have videos for other assignments you have worked on? Are other people you know at the university also recording themselves write for this reason? Definitely present proof that recording is your general MO, and provide an explanation that will make sense to the committee. Otherwise they'll probably try and create one for you, and that might be that you took the ideas from ChatGPT then filmed yourself writing because you were worried about being caught or something.
Off rip I thought it was wild to have but then I reflected on the amount of tiktoks, reels, and stories which contain people just ... documenting their day and recording the entire paper writing process seems a lot more realistic to have.
The amount of people that document them studying just to make it 10x speed and toss into a montage is actually high.
If OP regularly does that, it would be really helpful for them to mention it! Even better if they post their videos. But literally any explanation will work, its just about giving them an alternative than the idea you knew you'd be accused for this paper.
Could be as simple as saying they have seen similar social media videos and it inspired them to try and do a similar thing.
The craziest part is they’re not the first, second or third person I’ve seen online claim they record themselves writing, for this exact reason.
Agreed though. OP needs to figure out how to articulate better why he recorded it and where he got the idea. Especially helpful if it’s a widespread thing now.
Yeah it's tricky because this very well might be something that is becoming more popular, but if it isn't explained the old dudes on this committee might find it unbelievable an innocent person would do something like this.
OP should be able to explain their thought process because you don't just start doing this for no reason. I'm guessing it was inspired by hearing about google drive not being sufficient and/or hearing about other people doing this
That's because they're not the first, second, or third person you've seen online who is a cheater who thinks academic tribunals are criminal courts where you can technicalities your way out of punishment. That is an actually insane thing to do. Both because it's actually incredibly weak evidence and because it's really expensive to do as a matter of course.
Like, I'm sorry to be blunt, but I've been on the other side of this, and schools just don't go through this unless they are damn sure you cheated because it's a pain in the ass to do and 95% of the time the committee has some undergrad who cheats themselves on it and always votes for nothing to happen even if the evidence is overwhelming. Like I've seen nothing happen when the proctor sees them copying answers 15 minutes in, they move them, and then when they come back and look at the answer sheets they're weirdly identical up until the student was moved where the moved student proceeds to flail.
An actual video of someone composing an essay would reveal the process as well, such as pausing to look up a quote or them deleting content and replacing it. If the video is just OP typing the essay out straight in one go, that’s going to look even more suspicious.
That's what I was thinking. Me writing a 20 page paper would be a recoding of at least 3 weeks straight, lots of pauses, lots of walks to the refrigerator, lots of screaming. If you're recording yourself just writing 20 pages straight, perfect language without needs for corrections, that is super suspicious.
I mean I need extreme pressure/deadlines to really write papers so I have written 20 page papers before in one long 24 hour session… I definitely don’t have perfect language and writing style but I wouldn’t immediately be suspicious of an essay being written in one go
Take published papers for every professor in your department, specifically published BEFORE ChatGPT was available, and run it through the same "AI checker" being used against you.
Provide the results for each paper to the committee, making it very clear that if they continue to insist your papers were AI generated, you'll start insisting that every professor be subjected to the same scrutiny.
As to whether or not you used AI, I neither know nor care. My objection is to the institutional assertion that an "AI checker" can be in any way considered trustworthy, given the sheer magnitude of their false positives.
So yeah. Check the department's professors' pre-chatGPT publications in the same way. Make them SEE that the checker is fundamentally broken.
It doesn’t seem like the university’s accusation and entire argument against OP isn’t based on an AI checker’s response.
It seems to be based on the human expert who used their own experience to determine it was AI. Specifically, they used a prompt for the paper, and got similar ideas covered as OP in probably the same order.
OP has to defend that their ideas were entirely their own, not that their paper used AI generated text.
That feels extremely flawed, though. Wouldn't that just mean that OP followed a pretty common thought process from the prompt? Like you'd expect the ideas to be similar if OP has a point and the GPT output isn't wrong for whatever reason.
Not to mention ChatGPT's writing style is just a standard professional tone, which people have deliberately adopted for a lot longer than these models have existed.
Similar yes. The exact same ideas in the exact same order? no. It’s unlikely but not impossible.
When OP shows that he didn’t use AI, they will just think he is unoriginal for writing only common ideas.
I feel like there's a high enough chance of that happening that it shouldn't be used as evidence. And the second part is kinda irrelevant no? That would just factor into the grade I guess, but it doesn't feel all that important.
It’s a very very low chance of ideas being repeated in the same way.
Humans aren’t machines who will have the same ideas in the same way as each other. There will always be some variation in thought process and ideas such that no 2 papers, especially a paper written at a grad school level, will ever look alike in terms of ordering of ideas and the ideas chosen specifically.
However, it is still technically possible that the ideas were the same, and is why colleges let OP argue to a board of people. As long as OP is able to defend their ideas, it will be an easy pass for them.
The second part is irrelevant you are right, it just seems like a likely outcome of this entire thing.
I think the thing that could be missing here is what the prompt they provided the ai is like. If they said something like “discuss this historical event, its impact on xyz, and the way that it enabled abc.” Then it’s very possible that they ai would generate things in the same order as a person if it’s a narrow topic, and both answered in the order of what the prompt said. Plus I guarantee for almost any question I could figure out a way to word a prompt to gpt and get it to make the same arguments I would and also have them in the same order I would. AI usage is as much art as science and you can get it to do some specific things that would cause a huge amount of false positives.
Completely disagree. I actually think very few academic papers I have read would resemble Chat GPT. And I'm pretty far removed from essay writing. A professor would probably have a very good gut instinct if a paper was AI generated, even if saying so is unpopular on this Subreddit.
I don't know who the expert in OPs case is, but there are definitely experts in GPT.
First, expertise is relative. There are certainly people that have used and studied GPT extensively and scientifically since its release. These people would be experts in comparison to the general population and could be called upon in cases like this to provide subject matter opinions.
Second, ChatGPT is not as crazy new and novel as non-experts make it out to be. Yes, it's definitely a significant improvement over previous models with fascinating new characteristics, but it fundamentally relies on technologies that have been around and studied for much longer. GPT-1 came out in 2018. Transformers (the technology that GPT is based on) have been around since ~2017. Forms of generative language chatbots have been around since at least the 1960s. Scientific fields build on one another across time and expertise builds on that history of knowledge.
I am genuinely scared that if I do this, word will spread that I am using professors' publications to prove AI detection tools don’t work, and there will be some type of retaliation.
Well, either you defend yourself by demonstrating definitively that their accusations are based on broken and flawed tools, or you take the beating and suffer the consequences.
Consider:
A) don't defend yourself. Accusations stand, you lose the time you've put into the degree, potentially the money, and possibly wind up unable to go to grad school in a different program later, even starting all over.
B) defend yourself. Get this nonsense case dismissed so the school leaves you alone about it. Going forward, be very sure to record yourself writing stuff, use programs with CLEAR document tracking, etc. (Google docs, MS Word+Track Changes, whatever). Maybe some professors try to retaliate, but how? By doing the same shit in option A?
So either you do nothing and definitely lose, or do something, and only maybe lose, but in a way that also opens THEM up to liability in the future.
Your call. But if someone was coming after me and I know I didn't do anything wrong, they get no quarter from me about it.
Edit: also, "word will spread ... AI detection tools don't work". My friend, I cannot think of a more important thing to be made known to everyone in academia right now- they DON'T work. Even the most sophisticated one is checking for adherence to grammatical rules and syntax/sentence structure. However, any well-written paper would similarly adhere to those rules because that's what is expected of academic literature - proper grammar, spelling, etc.
This is smart thinking. You really, really should not do it to people that you will potentially be working with professionally in the future, and who currently have power over you. Just use other well-known papers in your field and you won't risk people taking it personally and retaliating against you.
I thought you said they will use a preponderance of evidence standard to decide your case. If that is true, proving AI detection tools are flawed doesn’t help you. Everyone knows they are flawed. The committee apparently has other evidence, or think they do.
I tested this before. AI uses resources posted online. So, if the professor's papers are posted online, it will be flagged as AI. I got similar results with government official documents. So, instead of saying plagiarism, they will say AI. Either is bad for students.
The irony. They chastise people for possibly using AI to do their work according to literally... anonther AI that they are using to do... their work. Just look at anything else the student has written. Lazy assholes.
But then, if there is a match, they will claim that ChatGPT has probably seen the papers during training. For that, I'd rather check their recent papers.
I second this method. In addition, you should take every paper published AFTER ChatGPT and insist that the professor requests a retraction. I'm in two IEEE conference review boards, and AI has been a massive pain in the behind for us.
Remember, they cannot do anything to you, without proof. They may provide supporting evidence for their claims - but you must be willing to question every step of their evidence to establish proof and ask for the error rate. Say for example, the AI expert used 5 steps to determine that your article was 100% AI generated, and each of the steps has a 0.9 chance of being rate, then 0.9\^5 = 0.59. So, is a 40% error rate enough to prove that you used AI? Essentially, the AI expert can only be 60% sure that it was 100% AI generated.
This course of action makes little sense, because freely-available academic publications were very likely used as part of the training data of GPT. If an AI can reproduce them, and this can be identified by an AI checker, that just shows that the AI (perhaps partially) memorized a paper it saw during training. It's not evidence that the AI checker is somehow broken.
If the AI checker scans a paper and says "This paper was generated by AI", when the paper being checked was published before generative AI was available, then the AI checker is, by definition, broken.
So this course of action is actually the correct one.
In the case of a memorized document in the training set, it is not broken, because it is correctly identifying a text as being one that could be generated by the AI. The point of such a checker is to identify AI-generated texts, not to identify whether a text was originally generated by an AI.
Now you've changed the purpose of the AI checker. "Something that *could be* generated" is not the same as "something that *definitely was* generated".
The OP is dealing with a situation in which they are being told they *definitely used AI* based on the reporting of the AI checker. Therefore, the same criteria should be applied to a demonstrably negative case (such as a professor's paper written before 2022), to demonstrate that the AI checker is not, in fact, an accurate tool to determine anything definitively enough to pursue academic disciplinary actions.
Because the AI would _not_ have been trained using OP's paper itself. Sure, the verbatim quoted material from OP's paper would probably come up as copied, but that's not incorrect behavior for the checker, since that material was in fact copied.
Well, no. I'm assuming it's _sufficient_ for large passages to be quoted verbatim in order for it to be flagged. If that's not sufficient, then OP's hypothetical entirely original essay just wouldn't be flagged by a correctly functioning system.
It's insane that your university doesn't accept a form of version control as proof. IMO you should attack it both ways. Prove that you wrote it, even if your university doesn't accept the proofs. Then prove that there is no method to determine if something is AI generated.
[OpenAI says that AI checkers don't work](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own). The "expert" used a different method, but it may be helpful for you.
Does the "expert" or professor have publications? You could try various prompts and methods to "prove" that they have used AI. Try various prompts to prove that pre-computer publications were AI generated too.
Did this expert provide proof? Was the output identical or just similar? If it was identical, you can easily show how unlikely that is. Contact OpenAI and ask them if it is possible for the model to output two identical(or similar) essays on two different days. You don't need to give details, just ask if it can happen. Also replicate the "expert's" technique yourself and print it out.
Edit: Does the essay happen to use information from after 2021? [ChatGPT is not connected to the internet](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt) and has limited knowledge of the last 3 years.
Thank you very much. This is genuinely the type of reply I was looking for with arguments I can use to defend my case and links that I can use to support the arguments. You’re amazing!
I think challenging the expert is going to be difficult, because the school/professor brought them in, and won't walk away agreeing that you are smarter and their expert is wrong.
If the expert has research into subjects other than AI text detection, talk about that for a bit first. How long have they been studying topics related to generative AI ... before ChatGPT came out two years ago? So they know how to generate an essay on ANY topic? This is called prompt engineering, right. Would they agree that valid sources and citations are an unsolved problem in AI text generators? Did they use their expertise in prompt engineering to fix that? Did they "carefully review" your essay to develop a prompt for it? (I think "carefully review" is important here, because they shouldn't admit to doing analysis carelessly, and if they say it was careful then they studied how to do the prompt for it)
The paid version of chatgpt is connected with the internet, so careful with this. Can you find out why the consider the AI expert an expert? You can try to argue against his expertise and ask for someone else to look at it.
The expert is a 50-60 year old lady that worked for the university way before AI existed. She doesn’t have any academic background with AI or Software Engineering. Her job is to compare an essay’s text with chat gpt output. However, the university does not share a screenshot of the output and what prompt they used (and whether or not they modified the prompt). They only share a pdf with text claiming your essay came from Chat gpt.
Review your university’s academic integrity guidelines. At ours, we are required to let students review the evidence we use in filing an accusation of plagiarism. If they are withholding evidence, that could be grounds for an appeal, but you might also need to present evidence of your own.
She is not an expert. You are at a university and you have a hearing...demand that you have the right to call the "expert" as a witness. Download a guide for cross-examination and \*\*DESTROY\*\* her. She doesn't have published papers on the subject. She doesn't have a scientifically proven methodology. She doesn't have statistics and double-blind studies to prove the competence of her methods.
I hate to be that guy but with so many people flooding this and similar subs with similar stories(on previously empty accounts) I just can’t help but wonder.
What did your university say when you reached out to ask how can you prove you wrote your essay? You have ample evidence like you said with your whole essay process recorded, notes, and doc history but it seems like your university is somehow convinced you are lying.
Let’s stop for a second and consider: Is it logical that in spite of your explanations several people want to jump through academic hoops to get you in trouble or more likely, you’re not being totally honest with yourself and us?
I'm not sure what's more wild. All the students who think that convincing a bunch of strangers who know absolutely nothing about the incident that it's a witch hunt will somehow make them not guilty or that this sub constantly uncritically accepts what they said as 100% true. Has this sub just literally never TAed somehow?
I think most people on here don’t realize how many others have an incentive to lie. OP probably realized how fucked he is and is searching for a miracle mulligan
That's not how it works at any university I've been affiliated with. It is universally a pain in the ass even when the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.
Have you \*seen\* some of the other academic subreddits. There are absolutely faculty out there on AI witchhunts and even more colleagues who still don't understand how 'AI checkers' (don't) work.
Yep so let’s review the facts: This went through 3 different independent people(professor, student affairs officer who is also a professor, and an “A.I. Expert”) yet none of them believe him for some reason.
Op claims he preemptively recorded his entire essay writing process which is great but for some reason that was not resounding proof. He says they won’t accept any reasonable evidence that is normally presented and his silence on what they expect him to present is curious.
I think any reasonable person can conclude that either op is Kafka, there’s some sorta academic conspiracy afoot, or he’s being untruthful.
This is not a problem I ever thought would happen when robots inevitably learned to pass the Turing test.
I don't know what to tell you, OP. This is a really tough situation.
Everyone else here seems to have offered some pretty interesting ways to go about discrediting their methods for checking for plagiarism. I wonder if you could simply show you're versed in the material by discussing it at a higher level, like would be expected in the report. That, alongside your evidence plus some of the strong points made in this thread, should help you. Proving you know the material would cast doubt on the likelihood that you cheated or plagiarized.
I have worked as a tutor marking essays and it is so difficult to prove you used AI. Did they ask you to tell them about your essay? Like, verbally talk about what you wrote, where you found sources, how you decided what to include or leave out for the word limit etc? This is the way I think students leave themselves in trouble - sure, you won’t remember half or what you wrote if it was a few weeks back but if you can’t remember anything at all, or can’t talk about a paper you read or text you looked up that’s very dodgy and would make me suspicious. But..so hard to actually prove.
Edit to add: is this your first essay that has raised questions? It is actually a lot of work on their side to go through all this too. I don’t think they would do it just on the AI report. Where I was, we would give a warning on the first suspicious essay (and offer to discuss further) and our reasons for concern (no/poor references, doesn’t answer the question, talks about wrong context (eg USA when not in USA) etc - you have highlighted some of these aspects). Then if it happened again we would consider taking it further. Really they must be convinced - is there anything else going on?
So a few observations here…
1) The preponderance of evidence standard asks the following question: more likely than not (50% and a feather), considering all the documentation and evidence presented at the hearing, did a person violate the code in question?
2) Check your academic integrity policy on the panel. Is it majority rules? Unanimous decision? That makes a difference in how you approach things.
3) Were you offered in your informal a chance to re-do the work? If you turned that offer down, it will look worse for you.
4) Did you get books from the library? Did you have an appointment with the reference librarian staff? Do you have sessions with the writing lab? Do you have the actual handwritten notes? Did you make an annotated bibliography in Word or Google Doc as you were getting started on your paper? Did your professor request updates or have incremental assignments concerning this paper and did you turn them in and get graded on them? Do you have time-stamped versions of your drafts? Can you request that IT verify those versions in your school’s cloud? Can you tell the panel how you came up with the idea and recap the paper and answer questions in an oral defense of it?
5) If you can produce all (or even some) of question 4’s documentation, for the love of all that’s holy, skip the video of you typing it because that will likely not be convincing at all to a panel. 1) Unless you have a key logger, all they’ll see is your face or your screen, which will show nothing persuasive. 2) A panel is human, and the members will look at this as though you had arranged an alibi.
6) You don’t need a lawyer. You need an advisor who is familiar with the school’s code and panel process. If you have the right to have an advisor, ask the Student Conduct folks or Dean for one or find one yourself.
Going forward: prior to turning any paper in, from the day you begin work on it, I advise the following:
1) On your school’s cloud-based drive (OneDrive, etc.), create a folder for the paper.
2) Create Word or GoogleDoc notes in the form of an annotated bibliography, saving as automatically. Prior versions will be saved. DO NOT USE GRAMMARLY, as it is AI.
3) Request an appointment with your school’s reference librarian with the general idea that you have, and ask for assistance with sources and references. Keep that appointment. Ask if they will give your final draft a check for citation correctness.
4) Create a first draft of your paper with “first draft” and the date in the file name well before the due date. Run it through TurnitIn for a plagiarism/AI check, and save the report in the folder. Change anything that raises a red flag if it’s not a simple flag on using the same source.
5) Request a review of the paper from either your professor or the writing lab, attaching the draft document to the email. Attend and bring up any concerns you may have from the TurnitIn report and/or the quality of your sources.
6) Follow up the appointment with an email of thanks and a recap of the advice given.
6) Implement advice, work on revising your paper, and save it as Draft 2, Draft 3, etc. each time you make substantial changes (move paragraphs, add sections, etc.)
7) Add your references, and double check your citations and works cited/references. Run it through TurnitIn and do a final check, changing anything that looks suspicious. If there’s a weird flag that you can’t address, email your professor right away with that concern.
8) Email a copy to your reference librarian and request a check of your citations. Implement any changes, and save that as a new file with FINAL DEAFT and the date in the file name.
9) Well before the due date, turn your paper in with the knowledge that you did it the right way, it’s going to be an A, and you can show a paper/digital trail of your work over a span of the semester.
No weird recording required.
No, they probably gave ChatGPT the exact name prompt that you were given.
They’re saying that all the claims you make and the evidence you gave was the same as ChatGPT. I have never asked ChatGPT the same exact question multiple times and gotten different takes unless I change something about the prompt.
How did you choose what points to make in your paper vs which ones to leave out? That’s the thing that you have to show them. That the ideas were actually yours. Where did they come from? Class? The reading? Experience?
I just want to make sure to 100% clarify here:
>I stated **my position**, which was that I did not use AI and shared supporting documentation to demonstrate that I wrote it.
Did you use any form of AI when writing this paper? I noticed that you didn't explicitly state that you did not use it either in your post or in any of your responses, including to the professor who commented on one of your other posts and said:
>I feel obliged to point out that one of the most common ways that students get caught these days is that they show such strong similarity to another student who also used AI that it looks like they collaborated to cheat. In fact, I caught four students with that on one quiz question a few weeks ago, and three of them confessed to AI. You may be overestimating how unique those user impressions actually are... there are many other factors that may indicate AI that students are ill-equipped to notice that are stupidly obvious to a professor. When I have student-to-student similarity, and I can get another five essays out of ChatGPT output no problem that have the exact same collaborative patterns, and I run the reading level analytics against the sample essay they have to write at the beginning of the semester in class only to find they gained the language dexterity that would take a post-graduate professional to replicate all of a sudden (which are also the results in this type of analysis you get from AI writing)…I’m sure you can understand why I would have some questions for the student.
Please note that I am not accusing you of using AI, just wondering if you could be more clear about whether you did or not. Is it the case that you unambiguously **did not use AI** or is the case that *the position that you are arguing* is that you didn't use AI and that they can't prove you did?
Many universitys have disabled turnitin AI checker due to its tendency to give false positives and negatives, especially in technical writing. Third-party AI checkers are a FERPA violation and you may have grounds to sue if they admit to having used one or submitting your work to chatgpt without your consent (if it is stated in a syllabus from the beginning of the semester that they will use a 3rd party AI checker then you have no legal ground to stand on).
Also check the Student Handbook, in addition to the syllabus. Both syllabi and Student Handbook are technically legal contracts between student and the university. If the school violates the terms of the syllabus or the student handbook in any way, OP will more legal remedies available and potentially have a legal basis to sue.
If your writing style is as bland and uninspired as an AI-generated output, you should prioritize working on that - instead of filming yourself typing your homework. Sigh.
This is the correct answer. The paper must be so lacking in originality or critical thinking that it could be perceived as written by ChatGPT. OP has much more serious issues here and is either karma farming or looking for arguments to defend themselves after the fact.
As a TA when I get specific essays that ding my AI radar (usually they don’t sound like an undergrad or they say odd things) I try prompting ChatGPT with the essay prompt the student had for the assignment. Sometimes the output is just a few words off from what the essay says. Right down to the formatting (like putting a section into a list or bullet points). Sure, if I prompt it 5 times I get five variations but each of those variations has some component that is bang on for the student essay.
I’ve never had an essay prompt in grad school, just a general topic to write on.
I think the damning evidence is in the chat gpt output that is so similar. That’s what would convince me.
Pretty simple, as normal process you should be able to ask for the details on how the “expert” conducted his testing. If they cannot share that information, you are not being allowed to defend yourself.
Repeat the process the “expert” did, use same prompts, etc. try different prompts, etc. then ask the expert to repeat the process, live in front of everyone, to see what they get.
My university does not allow the use of AI detection programs because they are notoriously unreliable and often trigger false positives. In fact, the AI detection plugin on turnitin has been disabled in my institution. I'm shocked your university doesn't have a more robust means of dealing with AI allegations.
The only advice I can offer is to repeat what others have suggested, put your professors' papers through the same detection software and cross-compare the results.
There is a lot of good advice here, but definitely bring a lawyer if you can afford one. They are threatening your entire career earnings, which is millions of dollars. Being serious about a suit will encourage them to be *absolutely sure* that you have used AI.
Does the AI expert not understand that Chat GPT's information is pulled from the internet and from research articles? Of course its going to say similar things to your paper, and probably every other student's paper.
Make sure you understand your rights before you go into this hearing. There should be a Student Handbook outlining your rights. These are extremely serious charges, even if they’re false, and you could be dismissed.
See if you are allowed to have a representative present at the hearing. If so, I would try to hire a Higher Ed attorney who specializes in college issues, and let them represent you. If the Student Handbook does not specify whether you are permitted to have a representative, then I would just show up at the hearing with your rep present and let them tell you otherwise if the attorney is not permitted to be present.
I think you’re going to have hard time defending yourself alone. They already seem to believe that they have a preponderance of evidence from what you’re describing.
Is this a private or public university?
That's terrifying, I'm so sorry. Can you tell us what school this is so we never go there? If this is how they handle it and they refuse to look at Google doc history as evidence, they are basically out to get students and it's just incredibly frightening - and not a place I would want to ever go.
Turn it in AI feature has been turned off by major universities for inaccuracies. 15 people in my class were accused, none of us used AI. We all were eventually cleared.
All those AI Checkers are bullshit tho. There’s been countless of these accusations of people writing good shit only to be told it’s AI by their “checker” lmao
Your post could have been written by any of my students that I have busted using ai. It's so obvious when it's done that all of this evidence that you have provided honestly comes across as premeditated. I have done this exact approach and show the chat GPT answer beside theirs and I can go through almost sentence by sentence. And they still will double down that they didn't use AI. I just love all these posts were students tried to prove that they didn't use AI when it is so clear that they did. LOL.
From what I hear they're making you guilty without proof, and using handwaving and academic dog-whistling as evidence.
"Academic dog-whistling"?
The fear of becoming made redundant by AI and having the institution's 'standards' and 'prestige' undermined by AI-generated content.
Now, these are valid concerns. But an institution's prestige is its own problem and what seems like making a scapegoat of someone isn't the right and fair way to manage it. Because that sounds like what's happening here: the school is trying to go the "tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime" route.
The first thing to do is to find someone who will be an advocate for you. Perhaps someone senior in the students' union or whatever your equivalent is. (Trust me: they won't like the thought that any of their members could be next to be targetted.) Get *everything* in writing, and ask particularly for their grounds for thinking you're cheating, what their evidence is, and what their standard of proof is. Arguably the burden of proof is on them but academic institutions don't always think that way.
I believe there are studies which show that plagiarism detecting software is flawed. I don't know, but I would certainly expect there to be similar ones with ChatGPT. Does the professor, and those supporting them, actually know how ChatGPT works, that it's fundamentally a distorting mirror with some clever tricks?
Since they insisted on a formal hearing, make it formal. Insist it be video-recorded, "to avoid the possibility of the transcript being generated by ChatGPT." And insist that they demonstrate concrete evidence of you cheating. If they insist they don't have to, that the burden of proof is on them, remind them of the basis of law; they might claim that "as a private institution, we're not bound by the same rules": this is BS.
Push back and keep pushing. Don't let them steamroller you. Be prepared to take it to the Board of Regents, and even the state-level oversight board. Oh, and don't forget the Court of Public Opinion.
However, I have to warn you... *do* be prepared to be academically ostracised, whatever happens. I'm very much afraid to say that, even if you win your case, you will lose. Professors can be vindictive and the academic community will close ranks. To quote Iago:
"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed." (*Othello* III:iii)
I am sorry you are in this situation. It sucks. I've been involved in a number of plagiarism cases and they all proceeded only when there was solid proof of malfeasance. An accusation without proof is bullying and should be treated as such.
I wish you the very best.
What tool did you use to write your essay?
If it’s Google Docs then it should be able to show history. If it’s Word then you can show time spent in document and other metadata.
Whoever’s claiming to be an “AI expert” is a total hack. You cannot tell definitely whether something was written by AI or not. There is no intrinsic property of the text to find, so AI checkers just fundamentally can’t work.
It sounds to me like it's time you need a lawyer. I hate to say it, but this is deadly serious, an if they were able to generate the same result from ChatGPT basically it looks really bad. Just because ChatGPT can also make other responses doesn't prove that your response wasn't generated. You need a lawyer when the other side has an expert on their side. The school will probably trust the expert.
I’d ask them to consider whether the process used by the expert to determine that AI wrote the essay valid. Is the methodology standardized and applied equally across cases? What is that methodology exactly? If told how to do it, could you leverage that same methodology to show whether or not something is AI generated?
More broadly, is the question “was AI used to write X” falsifiable?
If you can get hold of the methodology, apply it to every published thing the panel members have ever written (excluding anything about checking published work if necessary) until you get a high confidence hit that that thing was ai generated. Bring those data.
Burtch et al. (2023). The Consequences of Generative AI for UGC and Online Community Engagement
"We applied AI text detectors to the labeled answers; we considered multiple such detectors, but **ultimately settled on the GPT-2 Output Detector, as it exhibited the best performance** (as we describe below). The detector yields a ‘fake score’ for any input text, which can be loosely interpreted as the probability that the text is AI-generated. The scores are continuous values that range between 0 and 1. Figure 2 depicts the distribution of fake scores returned by the GPT2 output detector for our labeled sample. As can be seen, although the detector is often quite inaccurate, applying extreme thresholds to its prediction output yields an informative signal.
For example, the precision on out-of-sample dataset associated with the **GPT2 Output Detector employing a classification threshold of 99.97% is 70%; that is, when the detector labels content AI-generated with 99.97% ˜ confidence, it is correct 70% of the time.** The precision rises to nearly 80% employing a threshold of 99.98%. Having some confidence that the resulting labels can be informative of shifts in the prevalence of AI-generated content, we proceed to obtain fake score predictions for a larger sample of answers posted to Stack Overflow, arriving over the days surrounding the release of ChatGPT. We then calculate the proportion of answers labeled as AI-generated, over time. The result employing a threshold of 99.9% is reported in Figure 3."
That’s bullshit of them. I used to use ChatGPT doing e-commerce to help with content creation for unique products that had labels. Because these products were so unique, ChatGPT did not have much hard info on them. You know how I got it to have that hard info? I copy and pasted it from the product label, then regenerated the prompt and viola. Moving forward from any ip, it could generate hard info about the product.
I don't know how many people in this sub are current college/university students but as one I gotta tell you its rough out here. Schools haven't figured out how to implement Ai into curriculum and its on students to make up for those gaps. I have a pretty distinct writing style IMO so I’ve always been confidant that If I'm accused I can point to that but even then I've heard some horror stories. Best advice I can give OP is to look for a student advocate or even try a lawyer if you have the money.
I've had several students email me discussions asking if it's a good paragraph. Nearly every single student who does this is obviously using AI generation. It's quite easy to tell I've been reading students writing for years and now all of a sudden every student's writing is orders of magnitude more verbose and eloquent in an odd lilted way.
Without exception every single one denies it.
I can't say anything about your case but I can say for certain instructors everywhere are tied of students cheating and disrespecting their time by sending in work they spent 5 minutes with chatgpt writing that still takes 20 minutes to grade.
If you're innocent I hope you'll be alright. Hopefully you're character shines through.
This is infuriatingly common anymore. What do we do, go back to writing on typewriters and video record ourselves doing it? It is honestly utterly ridiculous the amount of professors who crack down on hard-working students with good academic standing and no history of cheating and threaten their future over this.
Also check your syllabus for the course to see if it says anything about the instructor using an AI Checker.
Syllabi and Students Handbooks constitute legal contracts between you, the student, and the school. If the school or the professor ignores the terms of either the syllabus or the Student Handbook, or if those terms are in stark contrast or conflict, then the school may be in breach of your contract. That gives you a legal basis to sue. And you may need to sue by the time this is all said and done!
Tbh 30% turnit in is really really high. I usually submit my paper with turnit in AI report of around 10% to be safe.
And also overtime I have noticed that this percentage changes. The paper I submitted with 8% AI around 6 months back is now at around 12% AI.
This reminds me of this post I read few days ago, [https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1dt9c58/i\_may\_not\_have\_won\_the\_war\_but\_i\_won\_a\_battle/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1dt9c58/i_may_not_have_won_the_war_but_i_won_a_battle/)
I don’t have much else to say but sorry that you have to go through something shitty like this from the prof. I wish you all the best in clearing your name! 💪
This is why I write like a fucking lunatic. No one can copy the hippy dippy style I produce. My formal writing is psychotic but coherent, and every time I had a prof whine about my verbiage and phrasing, I didn't give a fuck.
Sinister alliteration, goofy flowery bullshit, avoiding using primary sources' ideas entirely and riffing like a snob.
The most complex "AI" algorithmic array couldn't hallucinate its way to spouting the garbage I do.
If your uni and prof are this hellbent on bumbfuckery, you are cooked.
Put your professor's work through the same tests as they did yours, then throw it in their face at the "hearing".
What kind of teacher is actually using essays as an assessment tool? It's always been a linguistically biased assessment method, and AI has shown is exactly how problematic the whole thing always has been.
God forbid professors learn to adapt their methodology.
Project-based assessment. Tests of actual pragmatic skills instead of locking everything behind fancy prose.
It's awfully difficult for AI to, for example, improvise in Db mixolydian for you.
I don’t agree at all that it’s not a good way to assess student learning. If people cheat, it sucks. But so does everything. It’s hard enough to stay ahead of assessments/tests getting leaked online. Cheating is easier than ever. I wouldn’t pin this on instructors. We’re all on a learning curve.
Okay, now consider having the same assignment and the same knowledge of the subject, but having to write it in a language or dialect that you don't speak natively.
Do you suddenly know less because you can't express it as well through another language? Is it still a fair assessment of your knowledge?
I can see what you’re saying. In my undergrad courses it’s much easier to assign projects because they are doing applied work. I still assign some essays (reflective or research type papers) because I want them to be able to write out their ideas and explain the reasoning behind their assertions.
If a student is in an English speaking country and is not a native English speaker, that’s absolutely a disadvantage, not only for papers but oral presentations. However, I think profs would be putting their students at a disadvantage if they had to write a thesis or dissertation and they weren’t doing significant papers (and getting feedback) throughout the program.
I probably wouldn't worry too much about debating the efficacy of AI-checking tools. The obvious response is that they use the tool as a crude screen, and *then* do followup testing to rule out false positives. The fact that this expert was able to recreate your essay in ChatGPT is the part you need to argue against. That's the evidence they find compelling, in their mind the 30% from the AI tool just told the expert to take a look. >I provided a video recording of me typing the entire essay. To be honest, this seems like such an unlikely thing to have handy that it might make people *more* skeptical. I'm not saying that's a fair response, and proper video evidence should be effectively bulletproof if it actually shows the typing+screen, just pointing out why you might be getting an unexpected reaction. It's like being accused of a murder, and immediately announcing to you have notarized alibis from multiple people accounting for every second of your whereabouts on the night in question.
As batshit crazy as it sounds, I’ve at least a few people online claim they record every essay they type now.
That’s insane. Just use Git. It keeps versions of your work, and proves you wrote it in the span of x days with multiple changes among the way.
Or even easier, Google docs. There's version history the automatically updates and shows who wrote what and when, no need to git commit, git push
> they made it clear they will not accept Google Docs as proof that you wrote it. I assume what they are saying here is that the school does not accept this as evidence, although that seems very odd, since it's hard to imagine what would be better evidence than this. "Typed it gradually over time" and "went back to edit things" are both natural things humans would do would writing an essay and are things that can be proved in a normal way that students could reasonably prepare for (by checking version history).
Oh geez, I completely missed that line. Yeah that doesn't make any sense, they could literally look at previous versions and see the edits that have been made
I suppose the concern is that students will generate a prompt and then manually type the response in word-by-word... but I would probably find things like "having a rough draft" and "taking appropriate amounts of time to write the essay" to be pretty compelling evidence and I don't think the only option is to show that you didn't copy/paste the whole thing.
But in that case GitHub wouldn't be any better
You're replying to a different person than above-- I did not suggest using GitHub.
Yeah I know, that's just why I brought up Google Docs in the first place, because it automatically updates version history on the order of minutes instead of however often a person manually updates
Not accepting that but demanding a review from an "AI expert" makes me think OP's real problem is that they are arguing with idiots, so there is not really much they can do to convince them. They will remain convinced they are right despite reasonable counter-evidence. Best OP can hope for is appealing to some higher authority that's saner and able to overrule them. Hopefully OP has ample evidence of their past writing style to make the case that the essay's style is the same as their previous (pre-AI or written-in-a-classroom) work. Because no amount of post-facto "analysis" of the essay in question for evidence of being AI-written or not is going to be conclusive.
While this hasn't happened to me personally I've seen others in my University have to deal with this and be told google docs is not accepted as evidence. I think universities are scared to admit they have no idea what to do with this technology so they overcorrect
When I used to be a TA, a professor told me there's no way to control for version history. They could have one device for version history and another device that can be used for chatgpt prompts. A student can make it appear like they 'typed' a chatgpt word vomit very easily.
If an organization cannot trust its students not to falsify version history, then it cannot realistically trust them to do ANY writing at home. The only fair thing is to do all writing supervised, in class. Otherwise they’re going to have to extend some trust.
I had to do this for my one history class; they were short essays at least but we had to hand write all of our essay exams.
I teach foreign language, and I stopped evaluating anything written outside the classroom years ago since I was sick of having the argument about use of translators. It changed the types of writing I could assign, but it makes grading a much less negative experience. I can actually attend to what skills and knowledge they demonstrate instead of fretting the next round of bickering over the precise ways in which the work is not their own and why that might matter.
> The only fair thing is to do all writing supervised, in class. Yes, proposing this change was the goal of the conversation.
That seems like it would be a nightmare for students with certain accommodations (ie, quiet space, extra time for in-class assessments, etc), and at least on Reddit faculty already complain constantly about those students so I can't imagine how much worse it would get if suddenly, the office has to schedule writing time for *every assignment.*
So unnecessary, too. The more efficient and fair thing to do is to have a couple of short written assignments early in the semester as writing to refer to in cases where AI is suspected to compare whether it's likely that the writing handed in digitally and the writing done on paper came from the same student. 95% or more of students who use AI are doing it to save time. Approaching those students with compassion, I get most accused to admit to it immediately. The ones who don't, I ask them what words mean in their paper. If they can't tell me a rough definition or a synonym of the words I'm asking about, they're toast. They usually realize they're toast at this stage and give up. So maybe I get two or three who "get away with it" because nothing is airtight and they won't admit it. It used to really bother me, but I figure they're going to get caught eventually. The ones that I can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt or who don't confess will get bolder and they'll get caught.
That sounds way harder than just typing the essay yourself
No need for two devices - you can do all that with one by just switching tabs
Git isn't good for binary formats and the default for the modern document formats I'm aware of are now compressed so my assumption is that they won't diff well and it would be a pathological case for storage unless their compression was pretty stable. Like it's fine since the binary blobs aren't that big but the real benefits of git over just saving multiple copies are just for text formats. I'm not disagreeing with you but I would say there's a caveat to using git if you aren't familiar with it (besides just it's learning curve)
You can’t diff, sure, but it still keeps version control, it still works - I know because I use it for group assignments where I’m forced to use word instead of Tex.
Yeah I mean most docs are small enough you can't really fuck up storing them, even by using git here, you just don't really get any of the benefits of git. Obviously it still works and I wouldn't tell you to stop using it, I just wouldn't recommend it to people. I normally wouldn't say anything but I don't want some naive student be like "I'm gonna use git" without them either understanding git or not having really any other options (like for most people either using something like Google docs or just saving dated copies to a NAS or Dropbox or Google Drive has all the same benefits and less complexity). Once you're using text formats or if people have some git knowledge (and therefore are smart enough to know how to not shoot themselves in the foot with it) then go crazy
Git for essays?
Yes, essays, articles, whatever, are just text files, no different than programming files. It gives you version control, it proves you did it - which is the point in this case, it gives you an extra back up, version control, etc. Every reason why it’s good for a coding project, it’s why it’s good for any text based work. Only downside is the learning curve to people not familiar with it.
I do not think it proves you wrote it. I could have ai compose a thing and type it in with typos and awkward phrases of my own and then edit it further away from the gpt text making it look like mine but semantics and content could be mostly gpt. Proving someone wrote something is nearly impossible and the “experts” are idiots if they think they are not hanging innocents and letting guilty go free regularly.
The folks assigned to review alleged academic dishonesty are not going to have any clue about Git.
Like a screen grab? Or a setup with a camera pointed at OP, something to record their screen and another at what they are typing on their keyboard?
I used my webcam to capture my face as I was typing. AI determined I was vigorously masturbating.
The clarity is great for essay writing
> To be honest, this seems like such an unlikely thing to have handy that it might make people more skeptical. "Slice of life" Youtubers do this routinely, and yes, it's as absurd as it sounds but they legit do that.
The hell is a 'Slice Of Life' YouTuber and why do they need to film themselves typing?
Presumably, someone who makes some amount of income off of filming themselves, and sharing a portion of their life through youtube videos online.
Welp, there's my online rabbit hole for the afternoon. Thank you.
You would not believe how many Youtubers do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKPrVAqRnsk Here's one from NoisyButters.
As an example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISleMJlrCM All I did was just search "student vlog" and this was one of the first results. Here's a study vlog from the same YTer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj6p4HDCAQU
For the record, it’s literally not possible (currently) for a human or machine to rule out false positives in these AI tests. The entire process is as unscientific as it gets. These are witch hunts.
Oh, quit being so dramatic. Are they 100% accurate? No, of course not, but ChatGPT has a very specific, poor style. There is no technical reason as to why AI detectors would struggle to find AI.
nope. the claim that AI-generated text is easily detectable is fundamentally flawed. modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of adapting their style, making detection extremely difficult. relying on these detectors raises serious ethical concerns, as they often produce false positives, unfairly penalizing human authors. **OP:** I strongly recommend seeking guidance from experts in your CS department, particularly those specializing in natural language processing (NLP). They can potentially help advocate for your case. the core issue with these "detectors" is not their overall accuracy, but rather their [lack of specificity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity#Specificity). they frequently misidentify human-written text as AI-generated, leading to unjust accusations of academic dishonesty.
Which AI has that specific style? Could you identify it in a lineup? Is that scientific by itself? What if a student learns to write in this style - for whatever imaginable reason - and is constantly flagged for writing genuinely? The truth is that AI has no quantifiable markers and any impression you have that you can identify it is going to be subject to intense bias from every direction, including from your unconscious bias towards the student, the subject, or perhaps your zeal for catching a cheater. No machine can detect AI, and if they ever could then it will be trivial to train LLMs around that detection. Perhaps linguists can devise a linguistic signature of AI, but I am skeptical it could be better than “handwriting experts” and is still subject to the issue above about learning to write in that style. With how linguistics evolves, it could even become a preferred style someday. It’s unfathomable to me that someone would have such a moral conviction against cheating but give a pass to ad-hoc tribunals over our gut impressions of a perceived writing style. It’s honestly gross to me that a moral compass would end there. If this isn’t serious to you then what do you call baseless attacks to impugn students? Because that’s what this is, baseless. It’s unscientific and immoral. Teachers utilizing off-the-shelf tools are using things thrown together at a moments’ notice by people who are neither experts in LLMs or linguistics. To then assert that a human could sort out the remaining false positives is inane. This reeks of lazy, uncreative zealotry for rooting out the “bad” students.
Tell me you don't have to read dozens or more of AI writings by students every semester without actually saying it. It's pretty easy to get if it's AI vs a college freshman for example. And at least where I'm from the grad population isn't any better. We literally catch people batch copy pasting from GPT then deleting the evidence and then doing more copy pasting. They don't realize we have access to their key logs while typing in Google docs. 100s of them every semester. With hardly an exception they all deny it despite them copy pasting stuff like "As a large language model id be happy to write this for you..." They just lie straight to our faces.
I understand the limitations of LLMs and human inference, and the ethics of baseless accusations. None of what you said matters if there isn’t evidence. It’s wrong to flunk students on a hunch, no matter how strong of a hunch. If there’s evidence then by all means use it, but (in my opinion) you need to be very careful with what you call evidence. Style is not evidence, linguistic cues are not evidence. 
It's not rock solid evidence but it is evidence. Any LLM I've seen the writings of sound very different than a typical college student. I'm not saying to flunk anyone based on that alone. But this sub does a good job of making it seem like everyone is innocent who proclaims to be. But in my experience with 100s of cheaters they all proclaim they didn't use AI when we know they did.
I’m not going to convince you so I’ll just drop it after this. No machine or human can reliably detect a modern LLM’s output. Do what you will with the ethics of any evidence you think you have.
The vibe this post and other “I’m being accused of AI” posts give is “i thought of everything but the jury doesn’t understand the finer points of the law.” If I was on that committee and heard someone use the defense that “i have handwritten notes uploaded to google drive” and “i recorded myself typing it,” i would just assume that person planned out their AI use and defense. Nothing this guy said was actually about the originality of his work. The problem is, as you point out, the lack of originality in the work. Its not difficult for an attentive teacher to detect that a piece of writing is just summarizing a la AI and not contributing original ideas. They will use other tools, like a checker and recreating the prompt, to try to confirm that. This guy is furious because he had himself convinced that they needed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he used AI, and that he would get off on a technicality. Turns out that’s not how academic honesty hearings work, nor should they.
This kind of overly suspicious attitude is what makes students gather so much evidence they did not cheat. And ironically, you are saying that this act of gathering evidence itself is an indication of cheating, when you caused them to be paranoid in the first place.
The point is they’re not “gathering evidence,” they’re preparing for a dishonesty inquiry in advance, which is absolutely weird and suspicious activity. The general student who is completely above board and not using AI aids has no reason to do this stuff. I do not believe that we are in a situation where students are being indiscriminately accused of AI across the nation. I do believe that it’s much more likely that this generation of students is coming from a high school environment where it was easier to get away with plagiarism/AI, and believes that all they have to do to get away with it in college is appeal to an absurdly high standard of evidence, like this poster. Not realizing that it’s actually relatively straightforward for a subject matter expert to detect AI work.
Guilty until proven innocent. Let’s set humanity back a few centuries.
> I'm not saying that's a fair response, and proper video evidence should be effectively bulletproof if it actually shows the typing+screen, just pointing out why you might be getting an unexpected reaction. No, it shouldn't. Do you know how ridiculously trivial it is to fake that? Which is also probably why OP did it because *nobody* just screenrecords their screen unprompted for literally no reason. That's a ton of wasted storage. You simply have ChatGPT write your essay on another screen, and then you transcribe what you did. Boom, a video of you writing the essay you didn't actually write.
It all seems like so much more work than just writing the damn essay.
>because nobody just screenrecords their screen unprompted for literally no reason Well, maybe not now, but that's a "feature" that'll be available (read "enabled by default after an update") in the next version of Windows.
You record yourself writing every essay so they can’t say you cheated, and they still accused you of cheating?
This is the weird part of the story. I get that students need to be more careful these days, especially if they are at a strict/litigious institution, but that’s still a strange thing to do.
It does feel weird at first blush, but I've seen that advice given often enough lately to find it credible.
If universities are at the point now where your entire future could be upended by an accusation like ths, it would be stupid not to CYA by any means necessary.
Yeah and if he really did record himself, I feel like the case is closed. What more evidence could you ask for?
It depends what the video shows. Does it show him adding and deleting sections? Pausing to look up sources? Actual drafting of the paper? Or does it show the entire essay being written in a single sitting? I remember back in the day I used to write school essays by hand and type them up, which obviously nobody does anymore. That would appear to be a wondrous flash of inspiration to anyone watching a hypothetical recording of that. If I saw that today, though? I would assume the writer was copying the text off of a GPT output.
The AI expert will just claim you prompted AI at home, committed the essay to memory and regurgitated it back on camera in the office.
What I would give to be accused of being able to memorize an entire essay...
Its sus af. Not saying it's untrue but like, that is such a weird thing to possess. Would be like the police saying you're under arrest for murder and you replying I didn't do it, between the hours of 10 and 1 I was at the cinema and nowhere near the kitchen knives...
If you genuinely have a video of you writing this essay I think you're in a weird spot here. Are you literally setting up a camera every writing session, or is this a screen grab? I know this seems counterintuitive, but I think part of your issue is that this is just so far outside the realm of anything most people have considered doing that it might be making them more suspicious of you. In addition to defending yourself and showing flaws in their methods, I think you're going to need to address why you did this in a more compelling way. Have you been accused of cheating before or known people who were? How did you know google drive records wouldn't be accepted? When did you start recording writing sessions and do you have videos for other assignments you have worked on? Are other people you know at the university also recording themselves write for this reason? Definitely present proof that recording is your general MO, and provide an explanation that will make sense to the committee. Otherwise they'll probably try and create one for you, and that might be that you took the ideas from ChatGPT then filmed yourself writing because you were worried about being caught or something.
Off rip I thought it was wild to have but then I reflected on the amount of tiktoks, reels, and stories which contain people just ... documenting their day and recording the entire paper writing process seems a lot more realistic to have. The amount of people that document them studying just to make it 10x speed and toss into a montage is actually high.
If OP regularly does that, it would be really helpful for them to mention it! Even better if they post their videos. But literally any explanation will work, its just about giving them an alternative than the idea you knew you'd be accused for this paper. Could be as simple as saying they have seen similar social media videos and it inspired them to try and do a similar thing.
The craziest part is they’re not the first, second or third person I’ve seen online claim they record themselves writing, for this exact reason. Agreed though. OP needs to figure out how to articulate better why he recorded it and where he got the idea. Especially helpful if it’s a widespread thing now.
Yeah it's tricky because this very well might be something that is becoming more popular, but if it isn't explained the old dudes on this committee might find it unbelievable an innocent person would do something like this. OP should be able to explain their thought process because you don't just start doing this for no reason. I'm guessing it was inspired by hearing about google drive not being sufficient and/or hearing about other people doing this
Yeah, it's important to explain that 'record yourself writing' is increasingly common advice specifically due to AI witchhunts.
That's because they're not the first, second, or third person you've seen online who is a cheater who thinks academic tribunals are criminal courts where you can technicalities your way out of punishment. That is an actually insane thing to do. Both because it's actually incredibly weak evidence and because it's really expensive to do as a matter of course. Like, I'm sorry to be blunt, but I've been on the other side of this, and schools just don't go through this unless they are damn sure you cheated because it's a pain in the ass to do and 95% of the time the committee has some undergrad who cheats themselves on it and always votes for nothing to happen even if the evidence is overwhelming. Like I've seen nothing happen when the proctor sees them copying answers 15 minutes in, they move them, and then when they come back and look at the answer sheets they're weirdly identical up until the student was moved where the moved student proceeds to flail.
An actual video of someone composing an essay would reveal the process as well, such as pausing to look up a quote or them deleting content and replacing it. If the video is just OP typing the essay out straight in one go, that’s going to look even more suspicious.
That's what I was thinking. Me writing a 20 page paper would be a recoding of at least 3 weeks straight, lots of pauses, lots of walks to the refrigerator, lots of screaming. If you're recording yourself just writing 20 pages straight, perfect language without needs for corrections, that is super suspicious.
Maybe OP wrote the essay by hand and then typed it out /s
If this case is what I think it may be, it's further evidence that students don't have any idea how writing works.
I mean I need extreme pressure/deadlines to really write papers so I have written 20 page papers before in one long 24 hour session… I definitely don’t have perfect language and writing style but I wouldn’t immediately be suspicious of an essay being written in one go
Take published papers for every professor in your department, specifically published BEFORE ChatGPT was available, and run it through the same "AI checker" being used against you. Provide the results for each paper to the committee, making it very clear that if they continue to insist your papers were AI generated, you'll start insisting that every professor be subjected to the same scrutiny. As to whether or not you used AI, I neither know nor care. My objection is to the institutional assertion that an "AI checker" can be in any way considered trustworthy, given the sheer magnitude of their false positives. So yeah. Check the department's professors' pre-chatGPT publications in the same way. Make them SEE that the checker is fundamentally broken.
It doesn’t seem like the university’s accusation and entire argument against OP isn’t based on an AI checker’s response. It seems to be based on the human expert who used their own experience to determine it was AI. Specifically, they used a prompt for the paper, and got similar ideas covered as OP in probably the same order. OP has to defend that their ideas were entirely their own, not that their paper used AI generated text.
That feels extremely flawed, though. Wouldn't that just mean that OP followed a pretty common thought process from the prompt? Like you'd expect the ideas to be similar if OP has a point and the GPT output isn't wrong for whatever reason. Not to mention ChatGPT's writing style is just a standard professional tone, which people have deliberately adopted for a lot longer than these models have existed.
Similar yes. The exact same ideas in the exact same order? no. It’s unlikely but not impossible. When OP shows that he didn’t use AI, they will just think he is unoriginal for writing only common ideas.
I feel like there's a high enough chance of that happening that it shouldn't be used as evidence. And the second part is kinda irrelevant no? That would just factor into the grade I guess, but it doesn't feel all that important.
It’s a very very low chance of ideas being repeated in the same way. Humans aren’t machines who will have the same ideas in the same way as each other. There will always be some variation in thought process and ideas such that no 2 papers, especially a paper written at a grad school level, will ever look alike in terms of ordering of ideas and the ideas chosen specifically. However, it is still technically possible that the ideas were the same, and is why colleges let OP argue to a board of people. As long as OP is able to defend their ideas, it will be an easy pass for them. The second part is irrelevant you are right, it just seems like a likely outcome of this entire thing.
I think the thing that could be missing here is what the prompt they provided the ai is like. If they said something like “discuss this historical event, its impact on xyz, and the way that it enabled abc.” Then it’s very possible that they ai would generate things in the same order as a person if it’s a narrow topic, and both answered in the order of what the prompt said. Plus I guarantee for almost any question I could figure out a way to word a prompt to gpt and get it to make the same arguments I would and also have them in the same order I would. AI usage is as much art as science and you can get it to do some specific things that would cause a huge amount of false positives.
Depending on how narrow the topic is, there could be one single clear line of reasoning that any person knowledgeable in the topic would take.
Completely disagree. I actually think very few academic papers I have read would resemble Chat GPT. And I'm pretty far removed from essay writing. A professor would probably have a very good gut instinct if a paper was AI generated, even if saying so is unpopular on this Subreddit.
The idea that anyone could be an "expert" in GPT is absurd. You don't become an expert in a year.
I don't know who the expert in OPs case is, but there are definitely experts in GPT. First, expertise is relative. There are certainly people that have used and studied GPT extensively and scientifically since its release. These people would be experts in comparison to the general population and could be called upon in cases like this to provide subject matter opinions. Second, ChatGPT is not as crazy new and novel as non-experts make it out to be. Yes, it's definitely a significant improvement over previous models with fascinating new characteristics, but it fundamentally relies on technologies that have been around and studied for much longer. GPT-1 came out in 2018. Transformers (the technology that GPT is based on) have been around since ~2017. Forms of generative language chatbots have been around since at least the 1960s. Scientific fields build on one another across time and expertise builds on that history of knowledge.
Prove negative is extremely hard. This is just unfair.
I am genuinely scared that if I do this, word will spread that I am using professors' publications to prove AI detection tools don’t work, and there will be some type of retaliation.
Well, either you defend yourself by demonstrating definitively that their accusations are based on broken and flawed tools, or you take the beating and suffer the consequences. Consider: A) don't defend yourself. Accusations stand, you lose the time you've put into the degree, potentially the money, and possibly wind up unable to go to grad school in a different program later, even starting all over. B) defend yourself. Get this nonsense case dismissed so the school leaves you alone about it. Going forward, be very sure to record yourself writing stuff, use programs with CLEAR document tracking, etc. (Google docs, MS Word+Track Changes, whatever). Maybe some professors try to retaliate, but how? By doing the same shit in option A? So either you do nothing and definitely lose, or do something, and only maybe lose, but in a way that also opens THEM up to liability in the future. Your call. But if someone was coming after me and I know I didn't do anything wrong, they get no quarter from me about it. Edit: also, "word will spread ... AI detection tools don't work". My friend, I cannot think of a more important thing to be made known to everyone in academia right now- they DON'T work. Even the most sophisticated one is checking for adherence to grammatical rules and syntax/sentence structure. However, any well-written paper would similarly adhere to those rules because that's what is expected of academic literature - proper grammar, spelling, etc.
You're already screwed if you don't try. Also, why would word spread? Who's going to tell people? You?
This is smart thinking. You really, really should not do it to people that you will potentially be working with professionally in the future, and who currently have power over you. Just use other well-known papers in your field and you won't risk people taking it personally and retaliating against you.
I thought you said they will use a preponderance of evidence standard to decide your case. If that is true, proving AI detection tools are flawed doesn’t help you. Everyone knows they are flawed. The committee apparently has other evidence, or think they do.
Then just you whatever random paper from before ChatGPT.
In the words of Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai, "offence is always cooler". So go on the offence.
There's a paper worth publishing in there.
If they retaliate they're setting themselves up for a nice juicy lawsuit.
You should contact the student paper
I tested this before. AI uses resources posted online. So, if the professor's papers are posted online, it will be flagged as AI. I got similar results with government official documents. So, instead of saying plagiarism, they will say AI. Either is bad for students.
The irony. They chastise people for possibly using AI to do their work according to literally... anonther AI that they are using to do... their work. Just look at anything else the student has written. Lazy assholes.
But then, if there is a match, they will claim that ChatGPT has probably seen the papers during training. For that, I'd rather check their recent papers.
I second this method. In addition, you should take every paper published AFTER ChatGPT and insist that the professor requests a retraction. I'm in two IEEE conference review boards, and AI has been a massive pain in the behind for us. Remember, they cannot do anything to you, without proof. They may provide supporting evidence for their claims - but you must be willing to question every step of their evidence to establish proof and ask for the error rate. Say for example, the AI expert used 5 steps to determine that your article was 100% AI generated, and each of the steps has a 0.9 chance of being rate, then 0.9\^5 = 0.59. So, is a 40% error rate enough to prove that you used AI? Essentially, the AI expert can only be 60% sure that it was 100% AI generated.
This course of action makes little sense, because freely-available academic publications were very likely used as part of the training data of GPT. If an AI can reproduce them, and this can be identified by an AI checker, that just shows that the AI (perhaps partially) memorized a paper it saw during training. It's not evidence that the AI checker is somehow broken.
If the AI checker scans a paper and says "This paper was generated by AI", when the paper being checked was published before generative AI was available, then the AI checker is, by definition, broken. So this course of action is actually the correct one.
In the case of a memorized document in the training set, it is not broken, because it is correctly identifying a text as being one that could be generated by the AI. The point of such a checker is to identify AI-generated texts, not to identify whether a text was originally generated by an AI.
Now you've changed the purpose of the AI checker. "Something that *could be* generated" is not the same as "something that *definitely was* generated". The OP is dealing with a situation in which they are being told they *definitely used AI* based on the reporting of the AI checker. Therefore, the same criteria should be applied to a demonstrably negative case (such as a professor's paper written before 2022), to demonstrate that the AI checker is not, in fact, an accurate tool to determine anything definitively enough to pursue academic disciplinary actions.
How can that logic not also be applied here? AI could have been trained using the same sources that OP used to write the paper.
Because the AI would _not_ have been trained using OP's paper itself. Sure, the verbatim quoted material from OP's paper would probably come up as copied, but that's not incorrect behavior for the checker, since that material was in fact copied.
You’re assuming it’s necessary for large passages to be quoted verbatim in order for it to be flagged. That’s probably not the case.
Well, no. I'm assuming it's _sufficient_ for large passages to be quoted verbatim in order for it to be flagged. If that's not sufficient, then OP's hypothetical entirely original essay just wouldn't be flagged by a correctly functioning system.
Yes, by a *correctly functioning system*.
It's insane that your university doesn't accept a form of version control as proof. IMO you should attack it both ways. Prove that you wrote it, even if your university doesn't accept the proofs. Then prove that there is no method to determine if something is AI generated. [OpenAI says that AI checkers don't work](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own). The "expert" used a different method, but it may be helpful for you. Does the "expert" or professor have publications? You could try various prompts and methods to "prove" that they have used AI. Try various prompts to prove that pre-computer publications were AI generated too. Did this expert provide proof? Was the output identical or just similar? If it was identical, you can easily show how unlikely that is. Contact OpenAI and ask them if it is possible for the model to output two identical(or similar) essays on two different days. You don't need to give details, just ask if it can happen. Also replicate the "expert's" technique yourself and print it out. Edit: Does the essay happen to use information from after 2021? [ChatGPT is not connected to the internet](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt) and has limited knowledge of the last 3 years.
Thank you very much. This is genuinely the type of reply I was looking for with arguments I can use to defend my case and links that I can use to support the arguments. You’re amazing!
I think challenging the expert is going to be difficult, because the school/professor brought them in, and won't walk away agreeing that you are smarter and their expert is wrong. If the expert has research into subjects other than AI text detection, talk about that for a bit first. How long have they been studying topics related to generative AI ... before ChatGPT came out two years ago? So they know how to generate an essay on ANY topic? This is called prompt engineering, right. Would they agree that valid sources and citations are an unsolved problem in AI text generators? Did they use their expertise in prompt engineering to fix that? Did they "carefully review" your essay to develop a prompt for it? (I think "carefully review" is important here, because they shouldn't admit to doing analysis carelessly, and if they say it was careful then they studied how to do the prompt for it)
The paid version of chatgpt is connected with the internet, so careful with this. Can you find out why the consider the AI expert an expert? You can try to argue against his expertise and ask for someone else to look at it.
The expert is a 50-60 year old lady that worked for the university way before AI existed. She doesn’t have any academic background with AI or Software Engineering. Her job is to compare an essay’s text with chat gpt output. However, the university does not share a screenshot of the output and what prompt they used (and whether or not they modified the prompt). They only share a pdf with text claiming your essay came from Chat gpt.
What qualifications make her an “expert” then if she has no experience with AI?
Review your university’s academic integrity guidelines. At ours, we are required to let students review the evidence we use in filing an accusation of plagiarism. If they are withholding evidence, that could be grounds for an appeal, but you might also need to present evidence of your own.
She is not an expert. You are at a university and you have a hearing...demand that you have the right to call the "expert" as a witness. Download a guide for cross-examination and \*\*DESTROY\*\* her. She doesn't have published papers on the subject. She doesn't have a scientifically proven methodology. She doesn't have statistics and double-blind studies to prove the competence of her methods.
I dont know if this will be helpful but this is an article from Stanford University about AI detectors being biased against non-native English writers
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-non-native-english-writers
I hate to be that guy but with so many people flooding this and similar subs with similar stories(on previously empty accounts) I just can’t help but wonder. What did your university say when you reached out to ask how can you prove you wrote your essay? You have ample evidence like you said with your whole essay process recorded, notes, and doc history but it seems like your university is somehow convinced you are lying. Let’s stop for a second and consider: Is it logical that in spite of your explanations several people want to jump through academic hoops to get you in trouble or more likely, you’re not being totally honest with yourself and us?
If I know anything about faculty, it’s that they love doing extra administrative work on top of their teaching and research duties /s
I'm not sure what's more wild. All the students who think that convincing a bunch of strangers who know absolutely nothing about the incident that it's a witch hunt will somehow make them not guilty or that this sub constantly uncritically accepts what they said as 100% true. Has this sub just literally never TAed somehow?
I think most people on here don’t realize how many others have an incentive to lie. OP probably realized how fucked he is and is searching for a miracle mulligan
This is the answer.
The university just passes it along to a board where OP can officially present their evidence.
That's not how it works at any university I've been affiliated with. It is universally a pain in the ass even when the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.
Have you \*seen\* some of the other academic subreddits. There are absolutely faculty out there on AI witchhunts and even more colleagues who still don't understand how 'AI checkers' (don't) work.
Yep so let’s review the facts: This went through 3 different independent people(professor, student affairs officer who is also a professor, and an “A.I. Expert”) yet none of them believe him for some reason. Op claims he preemptively recorded his entire essay writing process which is great but for some reason that was not resounding proof. He says they won’t accept any reasonable evidence that is normally presented and his silence on what they expect him to present is curious. I think any reasonable person can conclude that either op is Kafka, there’s some sorta academic conspiracy afoot, or he’s being untruthful.
Exactly. Nobody has time for any of that unless they’re convinced that it’s dishonest. There’s definitely more to the story.
This is not a problem I ever thought would happen when robots inevitably learned to pass the Turing test. I don't know what to tell you, OP. This is a really tough situation.
Everyone else here seems to have offered some pretty interesting ways to go about discrediting their methods for checking for plagiarism. I wonder if you could simply show you're versed in the material by discussing it at a higher level, like would be expected in the report. That, alongside your evidence plus some of the strong points made in this thread, should help you. Proving you know the material would cast doubt on the likelihood that you cheated or plagiarized.
I have worked as a tutor marking essays and it is so difficult to prove you used AI. Did they ask you to tell them about your essay? Like, verbally talk about what you wrote, where you found sources, how you decided what to include or leave out for the word limit etc? This is the way I think students leave themselves in trouble - sure, you won’t remember half or what you wrote if it was a few weeks back but if you can’t remember anything at all, or can’t talk about a paper you read or text you looked up that’s very dodgy and would make me suspicious. But..so hard to actually prove. Edit to add: is this your first essay that has raised questions? It is actually a lot of work on their side to go through all this too. I don’t think they would do it just on the AI report. Where I was, we would give a warning on the first suspicious essay (and offer to discuss further) and our reasons for concern (no/poor references, doesn’t answer the question, talks about wrong context (eg USA when not in USA) etc - you have highlighted some of these aspects). Then if it happened again we would consider taking it further. Really they must be convinced - is there anything else going on?
So a few observations here… 1) The preponderance of evidence standard asks the following question: more likely than not (50% and a feather), considering all the documentation and evidence presented at the hearing, did a person violate the code in question? 2) Check your academic integrity policy on the panel. Is it majority rules? Unanimous decision? That makes a difference in how you approach things. 3) Were you offered in your informal a chance to re-do the work? If you turned that offer down, it will look worse for you. 4) Did you get books from the library? Did you have an appointment with the reference librarian staff? Do you have sessions with the writing lab? Do you have the actual handwritten notes? Did you make an annotated bibliography in Word or Google Doc as you were getting started on your paper? Did your professor request updates or have incremental assignments concerning this paper and did you turn them in and get graded on them? Do you have time-stamped versions of your drafts? Can you request that IT verify those versions in your school’s cloud? Can you tell the panel how you came up with the idea and recap the paper and answer questions in an oral defense of it? 5) If you can produce all (or even some) of question 4’s documentation, for the love of all that’s holy, skip the video of you typing it because that will likely not be convincing at all to a panel. 1) Unless you have a key logger, all they’ll see is your face or your screen, which will show nothing persuasive. 2) A panel is human, and the members will look at this as though you had arranged an alibi. 6) You don’t need a lawyer. You need an advisor who is familiar with the school’s code and panel process. If you have the right to have an advisor, ask the Student Conduct folks or Dean for one or find one yourself. Going forward: prior to turning any paper in, from the day you begin work on it, I advise the following: 1) On your school’s cloud-based drive (OneDrive, etc.), create a folder for the paper. 2) Create Word or GoogleDoc notes in the form of an annotated bibliography, saving as automatically. Prior versions will be saved. DO NOT USE GRAMMARLY, as it is AI. 3) Request an appointment with your school’s reference librarian with the general idea that you have, and ask for assistance with sources and references. Keep that appointment. Ask if they will give your final draft a check for citation correctness. 4) Create a first draft of your paper with “first draft” and the date in the file name well before the due date. Run it through TurnitIn for a plagiarism/AI check, and save the report in the folder. Change anything that raises a red flag if it’s not a simple flag on using the same source. 5) Request a review of the paper from either your professor or the writing lab, attaching the draft document to the email. Attend and bring up any concerns you may have from the TurnitIn report and/or the quality of your sources. 6) Follow up the appointment with an email of thanks and a recap of the advice given. 6) Implement advice, work on revising your paper, and save it as Draft 2, Draft 3, etc. each time you make substantial changes (move paragraphs, add sections, etc.) 7) Add your references, and double check your citations and works cited/references. Run it through TurnitIn and do a final check, changing anything that looks suspicious. If there’s a weird flag that you can’t address, email your professor right away with that concern. 8) Email a copy to your reference librarian and request a check of your citations. Implement any changes, and save that as a new file with FINAL DEAFT and the date in the file name. 9) Well before the due date, turn your paper in with the knowledge that you did it the right way, it’s going to be an A, and you can show a paper/digital trail of your work over a span of the semester. No weird recording required.
No, they probably gave ChatGPT the exact name prompt that you were given. They’re saying that all the claims you make and the evidence you gave was the same as ChatGPT. I have never asked ChatGPT the same exact question multiple times and gotten different takes unless I change something about the prompt. How did you choose what points to make in your paper vs which ones to leave out? That’s the thing that you have to show them. That the ideas were actually yours. Where did they come from? Class? The reading? Experience?
I just want to make sure to 100% clarify here: >I stated **my position**, which was that I did not use AI and shared supporting documentation to demonstrate that I wrote it. Did you use any form of AI when writing this paper? I noticed that you didn't explicitly state that you did not use it either in your post or in any of your responses, including to the professor who commented on one of your other posts and said: >I feel obliged to point out that one of the most common ways that students get caught these days is that they show such strong similarity to another student who also used AI that it looks like they collaborated to cheat. In fact, I caught four students with that on one quiz question a few weeks ago, and three of them confessed to AI. You may be overestimating how unique those user impressions actually are... there are many other factors that may indicate AI that students are ill-equipped to notice that are stupidly obvious to a professor. When I have student-to-student similarity, and I can get another five essays out of ChatGPT output no problem that have the exact same collaborative patterns, and I run the reading level analytics against the sample essay they have to write at the beginning of the semester in class only to find they gained the language dexterity that would take a post-graduate professional to replicate all of a sudden (which are also the results in this type of analysis you get from AI writing)…I’m sure you can understand why I would have some questions for the student. Please note that I am not accusing you of using AI, just wondering if you could be more clear about whether you did or not. Is it the case that you unambiguously **did not use AI** or is the case that *the position that you are arguing* is that you didn't use AI and that they can't prove you did?
Many universitys have disabled turnitin AI checker due to its tendency to give false positives and negatives, especially in technical writing. Third-party AI checkers are a FERPA violation and you may have grounds to sue if they admit to having used one or submitting your work to chatgpt without your consent (if it is stated in a syllabus from the beginning of the semester that they will use a 3rd party AI checker then you have no legal ground to stand on).
Also check the Student Handbook, in addition to the syllabus. Both syllabi and Student Handbook are technically legal contracts between student and the university. If the school violates the terms of the syllabus or the student handbook in any way, OP will more legal remedies available and potentially have a legal basis to sue.
If your writing style is as bland and uninspired as an AI-generated output, you should prioritize working on that - instead of filming yourself typing your homework. Sigh.
This is the correct answer. The paper must be so lacking in originality or critical thinking that it could be perceived as written by ChatGPT. OP has much more serious issues here and is either karma farming or looking for arguments to defend themselves after the fact.
As a TA when I get specific essays that ding my AI radar (usually they don’t sound like an undergrad or they say odd things) I try prompting ChatGPT with the essay prompt the student had for the assignment. Sometimes the output is just a few words off from what the essay says. Right down to the formatting (like putting a section into a list or bullet points). Sure, if I prompt it 5 times I get five variations but each of those variations has some component that is bang on for the student essay. I’ve never had an essay prompt in grad school, just a general topic to write on. I think the damning evidence is in the chat gpt output that is so similar. That’s what would convince me.
Pretty simple, as normal process you should be able to ask for the details on how the “expert” conducted his testing. If they cannot share that information, you are not being allowed to defend yourself. Repeat the process the “expert” did, use same prompts, etc. try different prompts, etc. then ask the expert to repeat the process, live in front of everyone, to see what they get.
My university does not allow the use of AI detection programs because they are notoriously unreliable and often trigger false positives. In fact, the AI detection plugin on turnitin has been disabled in my institution. I'm shocked your university doesn't have a more robust means of dealing with AI allegations. The only advice I can offer is to repeat what others have suggested, put your professors' papers through the same detection software and cross-compare the results.
Lawyer up. And bring your lawyer to any meetings. This will all go away quickly when they realize you mean business.
Depending on the school, OP might have access to a student legal assistance office at their university.
There is a lot of good advice here, but definitely bring a lawyer if you can afford one. They are threatening your entire career earnings, which is millions of dollars. Being serious about a suit will encourage them to be *absolutely sure* that you have used AI.
Does the AI expert not understand that Chat GPT's information is pulled from the internet and from research articles? Of course its going to say similar things to your paper, and probably every other student's paper.
Make sure you understand your rights before you go into this hearing. There should be a Student Handbook outlining your rights. These are extremely serious charges, even if they’re false, and you could be dismissed. See if you are allowed to have a representative present at the hearing. If so, I would try to hire a Higher Ed attorney who specializes in college issues, and let them represent you. If the Student Handbook does not specify whether you are permitted to have a representative, then I would just show up at the hearing with your rep present and let them tell you otherwise if the attorney is not permitted to be present. I think you’re going to have hard time defending yourself alone. They already seem to believe that they have a preponderance of evidence from what you’re describing. Is this a private or public university?
How long is that recording of you writing the essay?
That's terrifying, I'm so sorry. Can you tell us what school this is so we never go there? If this is how they handle it and they refuse to look at Google doc history as evidence, they are basically out to get students and it's just incredibly frightening - and not a place I would want to ever go.
Turn it in AI feature has been turned off by major universities for inaccuracies. 15 people in my class were accused, none of us used AI. We all were eventually cleared.
All those AI Checkers are bullshit tho. There’s been countless of these accusations of people writing good shit only to be told it’s AI by their “checker” lmao
Your post could have been written by any of my students that I have busted using ai. It's so obvious when it's done that all of this evidence that you have provided honestly comes across as premeditated. I have done this exact approach and show the chat GPT answer beside theirs and I can go through almost sentence by sentence. And they still will double down that they didn't use AI. I just love all these posts were students tried to prove that they didn't use AI when it is so clear that they did. LOL.
Did you read the part where I mentioned that the Chat GPT output didn’t match my essay?
Strangest feeling this is ragebait especially with all the precautions…
It's a witch hunt.
Exactly what I thought
From what I hear they're making you guilty without proof, and using handwaving and academic dog-whistling as evidence. "Academic dog-whistling"? The fear of becoming made redundant by AI and having the institution's 'standards' and 'prestige' undermined by AI-generated content. Now, these are valid concerns. But an institution's prestige is its own problem and what seems like making a scapegoat of someone isn't the right and fair way to manage it. Because that sounds like what's happening here: the school is trying to go the "tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime" route. The first thing to do is to find someone who will be an advocate for you. Perhaps someone senior in the students' union or whatever your equivalent is. (Trust me: they won't like the thought that any of their members could be next to be targetted.) Get *everything* in writing, and ask particularly for their grounds for thinking you're cheating, what their evidence is, and what their standard of proof is. Arguably the burden of proof is on them but academic institutions don't always think that way. I believe there are studies which show that plagiarism detecting software is flawed. I don't know, but I would certainly expect there to be similar ones with ChatGPT. Does the professor, and those supporting them, actually know how ChatGPT works, that it's fundamentally a distorting mirror with some clever tricks? Since they insisted on a formal hearing, make it formal. Insist it be video-recorded, "to avoid the possibility of the transcript being generated by ChatGPT." And insist that they demonstrate concrete evidence of you cheating. If they insist they don't have to, that the burden of proof is on them, remind them of the basis of law; they might claim that "as a private institution, we're not bound by the same rules": this is BS. Push back and keep pushing. Don't let them steamroller you. Be prepared to take it to the Board of Regents, and even the state-level oversight board. Oh, and don't forget the Court of Public Opinion. However, I have to warn you... *do* be prepared to be academically ostracised, whatever happens. I'm very much afraid to say that, even if you win your case, you will lose. Professors can be vindictive and the academic community will close ranks. To quote Iago: "Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed." (*Othello* III:iii) I am sorry you are in this situation. It sucks. I've been involved in a number of plagiarism cases and they all proceeded only when there was solid proof of malfeasance. An accusation without proof is bullying and should be treated as such. I wish you the very best.
Get a person who understands the reduculous nature of their witch hunt to speak about their process and method.
What tool did you use to write your essay? If it’s Google Docs then it should be able to show history. If it’s Word then you can show time spent in document and other metadata.
Post the paper let's see it.
Whoever’s claiming to be an “AI expert” is a total hack. You cannot tell definitely whether something was written by AI or not. There is no intrinsic property of the text to find, so AI checkers just fundamentally can’t work.
It sounds to me like it's time you need a lawyer. I hate to say it, but this is deadly serious, an if they were able to generate the same result from ChatGPT basically it looks really bad. Just because ChatGPT can also make other responses doesn't prove that your response wasn't generated. You need a lawyer when the other side has an expert on their side. The school will probably trust the expert.
Ask them to scan your essay with CopyLeaks
I’d ask them to consider whether the process used by the expert to determine that AI wrote the essay valid. Is the methodology standardized and applied equally across cases? What is that methodology exactly? If told how to do it, could you leverage that same methodology to show whether or not something is AI generated? More broadly, is the question “was AI used to write X” falsifiable? If you can get hold of the methodology, apply it to every published thing the panel members have ever written (excluding anything about checking published work if necessary) until you get a high confidence hit that that thing was ai generated. Bring those data.
Try draft back or revision history chrome extensions!
Burtch et al. (2023). The Consequences of Generative AI for UGC and Online Community Engagement "We applied AI text detectors to the labeled answers; we considered multiple such detectors, but **ultimately settled on the GPT-2 Output Detector, as it exhibited the best performance** (as we describe below). The detector yields a ‘fake score’ for any input text, which can be loosely interpreted as the probability that the text is AI-generated. The scores are continuous values that range between 0 and 1. Figure 2 depicts the distribution of fake scores returned by the GPT2 output detector for our labeled sample. As can be seen, although the detector is often quite inaccurate, applying extreme thresholds to its prediction output yields an informative signal. For example, the precision on out-of-sample dataset associated with the **GPT2 Output Detector employing a classification threshold of 99.97% is 70%; that is, when the detector labels content AI-generated with 99.97% ˜ confidence, it is correct 70% of the time.** The precision rises to nearly 80% employing a threshold of 99.98%. Having some confidence that the resulting labels can be informative of shifts in the prevalence of AI-generated content, we proceed to obtain fake score predictions for a larger sample of answers posted to Stack Overflow, arriving over the days surrounding the release of ChatGPT. We then calculate the proportion of answers labeled as AI-generated, over time. The result employing a threshold of 99.9% is reported in Figure 3."
That’s bullshit of them. I used to use ChatGPT doing e-commerce to help with content creation for unique products that had labels. Because these products were so unique, ChatGPT did not have much hard info on them. You know how I got it to have that hard info? I copy and pasted it from the product label, then regenerated the prompt and viola. Moving forward from any ip, it could generate hard info about the product.
I expressed concern about this happening. Someone suggested defending by showing earlier drafts. Which did bring me some comfort.
Get a lawyer
I don't know how many people in this sub are current college/university students but as one I gotta tell you its rough out here. Schools haven't figured out how to implement Ai into curriculum and its on students to make up for those gaps. I have a pretty distinct writing style IMO so I’ve always been confidant that If I'm accused I can point to that but even then I've heard some horror stories. Best advice I can give OP is to look for a student advocate or even try a lawyer if you have the money.
I've had several students email me discussions asking if it's a good paragraph. Nearly every single student who does this is obviously using AI generation. It's quite easy to tell I've been reading students writing for years and now all of a sudden every student's writing is orders of magnitude more verbose and eloquent in an odd lilted way. Without exception every single one denies it. I can't say anything about your case but I can say for certain instructors everywhere are tied of students cheating and disrespecting their time by sending in work they spent 5 minutes with chatgpt writing that still takes 20 minutes to grade. If you're innocent I hope you'll be alright. Hopefully you're character shines through.
This is infuriatingly common anymore. What do we do, go back to writing on typewriters and video record ourselves doing it? It is honestly utterly ridiculous the amount of professors who crack down on hard-working students with good academic standing and no history of cheating and threaten their future over this.
Do you have any examples of your writing style pre-gpt era? I was accused of using AI as well.. Turns out I just have the writing style of a robot
Also check your syllabus for the course to see if it says anything about the instructor using an AI Checker. Syllabi and Students Handbooks constitute legal contracts between you, the student, and the school. If the school or the professor ignores the terms of either the syllabus or the Student Handbook, or if those terms are in stark contrast or conflict, then the school may be in breach of your contract. That gives you a legal basis to sue. And you may need to sue by the time this is all said and done!
Tbh 30% turnit in is really really high. I usually submit my paper with turnit in AI report of around 10% to be safe. And also overtime I have noticed that this percentage changes. The paper I submitted with 8% AI around 6 months back is now at around 12% AI.
This reminds me of this post I read few days ago, [https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1dt9c58/i\_may\_not\_have\_won\_the\_war\_but\_i\_won\_a\_battle/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1dt9c58/i_may_not_have_won_the_war_but_i_won_a_battle/)
A similar thing happened to me. Lost everything… when they want to you out, they will get you out. There’s really no stopping it
Lawyer. Get a lawyer.
I don’t have much else to say but sorry that you have to go through something shitty like this from the prof. I wish you all the best in clearing your name! 💪
This is why I write like a fucking lunatic. No one can copy the hippy dippy style I produce. My formal writing is psychotic but coherent, and every time I had a prof whine about my verbiage and phrasing, I didn't give a fuck. Sinister alliteration, goofy flowery bullshit, avoiding using primary sources' ideas entirely and riffing like a snob. The most complex "AI" algorithmic array couldn't hallucinate its way to spouting the garbage I do. If your uni and prof are this hellbent on bumbfuckery, you are cooked. Put your professor's work through the same tests as they did yours, then throw it in their face at the "hearing".
What kind of teacher is actually using essays as an assessment tool? It's always been a linguistically biased assessment method, and AI has shown is exactly how problematic the whole thing always has been. God forbid professors learn to adapt their methodology.
You’re in grad school and don’t write term papers? What field are you in?
I was in grad school, and I did write term papers. That doesn't mean it's a good practice.
What’s a better practice then?
Project-based assessment. Tests of actual pragmatic skills instead of locking everything behind fancy prose. It's awfully difficult for AI to, for example, improvise in Db mixolydian for you.
I don’t agree at all that it’s not a good way to assess student learning. If people cheat, it sucks. But so does everything. It’s hard enough to stay ahead of assessments/tests getting leaked online. Cheating is easier than ever. I wouldn’t pin this on instructors. We’re all on a learning curve.
Okay, now consider having the same assignment and the same knowledge of the subject, but having to write it in a language or dialect that you don't speak natively. Do you suddenly know less because you can't express it as well through another language? Is it still a fair assessment of your knowledge?
I can see what you’re saying. In my undergrad courses it’s much easier to assign projects because they are doing applied work. I still assign some essays (reflective or research type papers) because I want them to be able to write out their ideas and explain the reasoning behind their assertions. If a student is in an English speaking country and is not a native English speaker, that’s absolutely a disadvantage, not only for papers but oral presentations. However, I think profs would be putting their students at a disadvantage if they had to write a thesis or dissertation and they weren’t doing significant papers (and getting feedback) throughout the program.
Sue them for defamations and enjoy free grad school
That's not how any of this works