Update. This fear has come true to such an extent that students who write well without #AI assistance now feel pressure to use AI to "humanize" their writing and avoid the charge of AI-assisted #plagiarism. #Grrr.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/college-students-ai-cheating-detectors-humanizers-rcna253878
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Update. More examples of this fear coming true.
AI-Written Homework Is Rising. So Are False Accusations.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ai-written-homework-is-rising-so-are-false-accusations
Update. How often might this fear come true? A new study "found that [an] #AI text detector erroneously identified up to 8% of the known real [human-written] abstracts as AI-generated text."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2153353923001566
Update. Here's another study showing that tools to detect #AI-written text are easy to fool with "simple techniques to manipulate the AI generated content." But this one goes a step further and makes the right recommendation for teachers and schools. "GenAI tools and detectors…cannot currently be recommended for determining academic integrity violations due to accuracy limitations and the potential for false accusation."
https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-024-00487-w
Update. More evidence that this fear has come true.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-18/do-ai-detectors-work-students-face-false-cheating-accusations
"Even…a small error rate can quickly add up, given the vast number of student assignments each year, with potentially devastating consequences for students who are falsely flagged."
Update. This fear has come true to such an extent that students who write well without #AI assistance now feel pressure to use AI to "humanize" their writing and avoid the charge of AI-assisted #plagiarism. #Grrr.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/college-students-ai-cheating-detectors-humanizers-rcna253878
Update. More evidence that this fear has come true.
"Fear of Being Flagged by AI Detectors Drives Stress Among Students."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/learning-assessment/2026/02/25/fear-being-flagged-ai-detectors-drives-student
"More than half (52 percent) of all those polled cited 'being accused of cheating when I did nothing wrong' as one of the factors causing them stress."
@petersuber this unfortunately has seemed like the logical conclusion. I wonder if the version control on most document writers could help? Like if a student is working in Google Docs you could possibly tell if they are copy/pasting or taking the time to type up the document. Of course, some could still generate a paper, type up a sentence or two, watch a YouTube video, and repeat to make it look human. Of course, than this is work which calls to mind why plagiarize in this way.
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