Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Moira Olmsted dreams of becoming an elementary school teacher, so
Speaker 2: last year she enrolled in an online program at Central
Speaker 2: Methodist University, working toward a degree while taking care of
Speaker 2: for toddler. For one of her classes, Moira had to
Speaker 2: turn in weekly writing assignments summarizing news articles, which was
Speaker 2: easy enough, but just weeks into the fall semester, she
Speaker 2: got an unexpected grade back.
Speaker 3: Early on in the semester, in one of her courses,
Speaker 3: she had received a zero.
Speaker 2: Jackie Devallos is a tech reporter for Bloomberg. She spoke
Speaker 2: to Moira over the phone.
Speaker 4: And I've might completely freaked out there those summary articles. Mainly,
Speaker 4: what we're doing is taking a bunch of information and
Speaker 4: just summarizing in maybe two three paragraph smacks.
Speaker 3: She didn't really know what had happened, and she just
Speaker 3: kind of saw it pop up on her student portal.
Speaker 3: She raised this with the professor, and the professor I
Speaker 3: told her that she had been flagged for using AI.
Speaker 1: She was like, hey, I run everybody's work through an
Speaker 1: AI detector, and yours has been flagged many times.
Speaker 4: It's just getting out of hand.
Speaker 2: But Moira says she never used generative AI tools like
Speaker 2: chat GPT to write her assignments.
Speaker 3: To her, it was being blindsided by this technology that
Speaker 3: she had never really seen before, and Moira immediately followed
Speaker 3: up asking for additional details as to how this could
Speaker 3: have happened.
Speaker 1: I was just like, okay, thanks for bringing that to
Speaker 1: my attention, Like I'm actually you know, I'm a future educator.
Speaker 1: I really am super against the use of AI, specifically
Speaker 1: in opinion and like thought pieces.
Speaker 3: She had to raise it to several administrators at her school.
Speaker 3: She had multiple meetings emails that showed you this back
Speaker 3: and forth between her expressing this confidence in her work
Speaker 3: that just was being put into question.
Speaker 2: Basically, her grade was ultimately changed, but Moira started to
Speaker 2: take extra precautions with her work, putting it through AI checkers, herself,
Speaker 2: screen recording her progress, and attaching the recordings to her assignments,
Speaker 2: anything to prove her work was original. But Jackie's reporting
Speaker 2: found there was another reason Moira's work may have been
Speaker 2: mistakenly flagged as AI generated.
Speaker 3: She's on the autism spectrum and she's always written with
Speaker 3: somewhat of a formulaic kind of style, and so Moira,
Speaker 3: understanding that this might be perhaps one of the gaps
Speaker 3: that AI detectors have, she knew she wanted to be
Speaker 3: armed with proof that she had completed her work in
Speaker 3: case this came up again. Students who fall into this category,
Speaker 3: either their neuro divergent or English as their second language,
Speaker 3: they tend to get picked up more than their peers
Speaker 3: who might not fall into these categories.
Speaker 2: Moira is just one student grappling with the challenges presented
Speaker 2: by this new frontier in education, and those challenges are
Speaker 2: playing out at schools and universities all over the country.
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News today. On the show, how universities and students
Speaker 2: are adapting to the emergence of generative AI and what
Speaker 2: happens when efforts to crack down on its use backfire.
Speaker 2: Jackie Moira wasn't using generative AI to do her homework.
Speaker 2: She's adamant that she wasn't, But other students are using
Speaker 2: tools like chat GPT to help write their papers. Can
Speaker 2: you just give us a sense of how big of
Speaker 2: a thing is this really? Right now?
Speaker 3: It's huge. Some students like to use tools just for
Speaker 3: the spell check just for the syntax, and then a
Speaker 3: level up to help me rewrite this one section to
Speaker 3: all the way to just help me write my entire essay.
Speaker 3: And this is where you've seen this other cottage industry
Speaker 3: of startups and tools crop up to help basically detect
Speaker 3: against that.
Speaker 2: I want to know more about how these AI detectors
Speaker 2: come to determine whether and how much a student has
Speaker 2: used AI and their writing or in their homework assignments.
Speaker 2: How do these tools work at a basic level?
Speaker 3: AI detection software like turn it in, copy Leaks, and
Speaker 3: GPT zero, which were some of the other startups that
Speaker 3: we had looked at, basically use technology not so dissimilar
Speaker 3: from that of a chat GBT. They train their systems
Speaker 3: off of just a lot of text in the same
Speaker 3: way that chat gipd does. However, AI writing detectors look
Speaker 3: at what's called perplexity, and this is just a fancy
Speaker 3: term for a measure of how complex the words are
Speaker 3: in any given submission or a sentence or a paragraph.
Speaker 3: We speak with a lot of variety. We vary our
Speaker 3: sentence structure and diction throughout a particular sentence or passage.
Speaker 3: If word choices are a little bit more generic and
Speaker 3: formulaic that's going to have a higher chance of being
Speaker 3: flagged by an AI detector. And it basically spits out
Speaker 3: percentage of how much it believes the assignment is AI generated,
Speaker 3: and so in Moiris's case, it was a majority of
Speaker 3: It doesn't highlight which passages. It also doesn't give you
Speaker 3: an answer for how it got there. It's kind of
Speaker 3: this black box.
Speaker 2: So educators are using these AI powered detectors to root
Speaker 2: out AI powered papers, but how well do these tools
Speaker 2: actually work?
Speaker 3: We found that they're actually highly accurate. So we tested
Speaker 3: GPT zero and copy leaks on a random sample of
Speaker 3: five hundred college application essays that were submitted to Texas
Speaker 3: A and M in the summer of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: This is important because, as we know, chat GPT was
Speaker 3: released in the fall of twenty twenty two, so we
Speaker 3: know that these essays were not AI generated because chat
Speaker 3: GPT hadn't even been released yet. After running the analysis,
Speaker 3: we found that these startups falsely flagged about one to
Speaker 3: two percent of the essays as likely written by AI,
Speaker 3: and in some cases they claim to have near one
Speaker 3: hundred percent certainty. But the problem is one to two
Speaker 3: percent of essays is still high in some ways, and
Speaker 3: that small error rate can add up just given how
Speaker 3: many student assignments are submitted throughout the year across the country.
Speaker 2: Yet two out of every one hundred students running the
Speaker 2: risk of being mistakenly accused of plagiarism, maybe getting expelled
Speaker 2: still feels pretty bad. Who is this affecting most?
Speaker 3: We found two groups and that can be particularly vulnerable
Speaker 3: to some of the flaws in AI detection software. One
Speaker 3: is if you're neurodivergent like Moira, if you're on the spectrum,
Speaker 3: for example. Another is if English is your second language.
Speaker 2: How disproportionately are these kinds of students being impacted by
Speaker 2: these false flags?
Speaker 3: Stanford researchers found that AI detectors were almost perfect when
Speaker 3: checking essays written by US born eighth grade students, but
Speaker 3: they flagged over half of those essays written by non
Speaker 3: native English speakers as AI generated. So the false flag
Speaker 3: there is extremely high.
Speaker 2: What about the impact on professors themselves? Is it making
Speaker 2: them more skeptical and more paranoid of the work that
Speaker 2: students are turning in.
Speaker 3: On the whole, professors are still a little bit on
Speaker 3: the fence about how exactly AI should be used in
Speaker 3: the classroom. You have some who are wanting to incorporate
Speaker 3: it into aspects of the curriculum, like using it to
Speaker 3: help you brainstorm or do some of the initial research.
Speaker 3: Other professors are telling me, we don't mind if you
Speaker 3: want to have chadgbt write this aspect of your essay,
Speaker 3: just cite it appropriately. Professors are trying to figure out
Speaker 3: at what point does AI kind of erode the experience
Speaker 3: of learning and at what point does it actually help it.
Speaker 3: But if they're there's one thing that professors agree on,
Speaker 3: it's that it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2: AI isn't going anywhere, But how can students and educators
Speaker 2: use the technology responsibly? That's after the break, We're back.
Speaker 2: I've been speaking with Bloomberg reporter Jackie Devalis about the
Speaker 2: shortcomings of software that colleges and universities are using to
Speaker 2: detect and root out AI generated work. Are they trying
Speaker 2: to set new policies to incorporate the understanding that these
Speaker 2: AI detection tools have some blind spots.
Speaker 3: Definitely. You know, you're seeing some schools put down firmer
Speaker 3: policies around what's considered plagiarism if you use chatchipt for
Speaker 3: a part of your essay and don't cite it, that
Speaker 3: can be considered plagiarism. But if you do cite it,
Speaker 3: then it's okay. And others are basically allowing professor to
Speaker 3: use these AI detection tools however they please without actually
Speaker 3: saying if your essay is fifty percent AI generated or
Speaker 3: ninety eight percent AI generated, then you will face a consequence.
Speaker 3: So it's left up to the professor to what's acceptable.
Speaker 3: But some universities are really mindful of the fact that
Speaker 3: these AI detectors aren't completely accurate.
Speaker 2: What are students doing to make sure that their original
Speaker 2: work isn't mistaken for AI?
Speaker 3: Students are really starting to get creative with how they
Speaker 3: can protect themselves. Many of them told me that, like Moira,
Speaker 3: they're starting to do their work in Google docs and
Speaker 3: tracking everything to create this digital paper trail. Others tell
Speaker 3: me that they're using other tech tools out there that
Speaker 3: are almost created as a way to humanize your text.
Speaker 3: I had a conversation with a student who went to
Speaker 3: school in California and telling me how he tweaks his
Speaker 3: wording in some parts of an essay to actually sound
Speaker 3: worse because he's afraid that if it sounds too good
Speaker 3: then that it might get caught by an AI detector.
Speaker 2: This all sounds like so much work for students and
Speaker 2: for educators to kind of work around the blind spots
Speaker 2: that this technology has. What are companies trying to do
Speaker 2: to improve their models.
Speaker 3: We spoke to almost all of the companies that we
Speaker 3: looked at, and what they told us is that they
Speaker 3: actually intentionally oversample underrepresented groups like students who might not
Speaker 3: be native English speakers, and that because of that, it's
Speaker 3: kind of this ever evolving process of iterating and making
Speaker 3: it more accurate. We also spoke to the copy leaks
Speaker 3: co founder and CEO who told us that they're ninety
Speaker 3: nine percent accurate, but still a small number of errors
Speaker 3: can occur from time to time. GPT zero was another
Speaker 3: company who told us that they're actually coming out with
Speaker 3: another tool that is almost like a tool that students
Speaker 3: will be able to write into, and it not only
Speaker 3: tracks your work, it has time stamps around when you
Speaker 3: entered the document, when you exited.
Speaker 2: So these companies are creating the problem and then offering
Speaker 2: solutions for the problem.
Speaker 3: In some ways, yes, it's funny because it also shows
Speaker 3: that they acknowledge that the detection software itself is imperfect.
Speaker 3: The thing that these companies emphasize is that they're now
Speaker 3: trying to get that professor feedback and relate to them too,
Speaker 3: that this isn't the end all, be all tool that
Speaker 3: you should use to grade your student's work.
Speaker 2: Jackie, My last question for you is just about Moira.
Speaker 2: How is she doing now? Has she finished her studies
Speaker 2: and is she becoming a teacher herself.
Speaker 3: She's on track to continue her coursework this semester, a
Speaker 3: mom of two now, and she's really excited about what's ahead.
Speaker 3: It's an ever evolving world, and she tells us that
Speaker 3: despite this overwhelming incident, which was unfortunate, she's still looking
Speaker 3: forward to being an educator in the future.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Jackie, Thank you. This is the
Speaker 2: Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode
Speaker 2: was produced by Thomas lou and Jessica Beck. It was
Speaker 2: edited by Aaron Edwards and Seth Fiegerman. It was mixed
Speaker 2: by Alex Suguia. It was fact checked by Adrianna Tapia.
Speaker 2: Our senior producer is Naomi Shavin, who also edited this episode.
Speaker 2: Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Our executive producer is
Speaker 2: Nicole Beamster Boor Sage Bouman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Speaker 2: If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
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Speaker 2: back next week.
Speaker 3: Hello,