this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025

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The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Llm detectors are always snake oil 100% of the time. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying for personal gain.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I just want to point out that there were text generators before ChatGPT, and they were ruining the internet for years.

Just like there are bots on social media, pushing a narrative, humans are being alienated from every aspect of modern society.

What is a society for, when you can't be a part of it?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Well if your books start talking back you should get help. The computer just started getting good (I remember Dr Sbaitso)

[–] [email protected] 112 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

I'm the type to be in favor of new tech but this really is a downgrade after seeing it available for a few years. Midterms hit my classes this week and I'll be grading them next week. I'm already seeing people try to pass off GPT as their own, but the quality of answers has really dropped in the past year.

Just this last week, I was grading a quiz on persuasion and for fun, I have students pick an advertisement to analyze. You know, to personalize the experience, this was after the super bowl so we're swimming in examples. Can even be audio, like a podcast ad, or a fucking bus bench or literally anything else.

60% of them used the Nike Just Do It campaign, not even a specific commercial. I knew something was amiss, so I asked GPT what example it would probably use it asked. Sure enough, Nike Just Do It.

Why even cheat on that? The universe has a billion ad examples. You could even feed GPT one and have it analyze for you. It'd be wrong, cause you have to reference the book, but at least it'd not be at blatant.

I didn't unilaterally give them 0s but they usually got it wrong anyway so I didn't really have to. I did warn them that using that on the midterm in this way will likely get them in trouble though, as it is against the rules. I don't even care that much because again, it's usually worse quality anyway but I have to grade this stuff, I don't want suffer like a sci-fi magazine getting thousands of LLM submissions trying to win prizes.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

As someone who has been a teenager. Cheating is easy, and class wasn't as fun as video games. Plus, what teenager understands the importance of an assignment? Of the skill it is supposed to make them practice?

That said, I unlearned to copy summaries when I heard I had to talk about the books I "read" as part of the final exams in high school. The examinor would ask very specific plot questions often not included in online summaries people posted... unless those summaries were too long to read. We had no other option but to take it seriously.

As long as there isn't something that GPT can't do the work for, they won't learn how to write/do the assignment.

Perhaps use GPT to fail assignments? If GPT comes up with the same subject and writing style/quality, subract points/give 0s.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Last November, I gave some volunteer drawing classes at a school. Since I had limited space, I had to pick and choose a small number of 9-10yo kids, and asked the students interested to do a drawing and answer "Why would you like to participate in the drawing classes?"

One of the kids used chatgpt or some other AI. One of the parts that gave it away was that, while everyone else wrote something like "I want because", he went on with "By participating, you can learn new things and make friends". I called him out in private and he tried to bullshit me, but it wasn't hard to make him contradict himself or admit to "using help". I then told him that it was blatantly obvious that he used AI to answer for him and what really annoyed me wasn't so much the fact he used it, but that he managed to write all of that without reading, and thought that I would be too dumb or lazy to bother reading or to notice any problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Did he get into the class after all that?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago

I have a similar background and no surprise, it's mostly a problem in my asynchronous class. The ones who have my in person lectures are much more engaged, since it is a fun topic and I don't enjoy teaching unless I'm also making them laugh. No dice with asynchronous.

And yeah, I'm also kinda doing that with my essay questions, requiring stuff you sorta can't just summarize. Important you critical thinking, even if you're not just trying to detect GPT.

I remember reading that GPT isn't really foolproof on verifying bad usage, and I am not willing to fail anyone over it unless I had to. False positives and all that. Hell, I just used GPT as a sounding board for a few new questions I'm writing, and it's advice wasn't bad. There's good ways to use it, just... you know, not so stupidly.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

How did they estimate whether an LLM was used to write the text or not? Did they do it by hand, or using a detector?

Since detectors are notorious for picking up ESL writers, or professionally written text as AI-Generated.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

They developed their own detector described in another paper. Basically, this reverse-engineers texts based on their vocabulary to provide an estimate on how much of them were ChatGPT.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago

They just asked a few people if they thought it was written by an LLM. /s

I mean, you can tell when something is written from ChatGPT, especially if the person isn't using it for editing, but is just asking it to write a complaint or request. It is likely they are only counting the most obvious, so the actual count is higher.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know of any reason that the proportion of ESL writers would have started trending up in 2022.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

That’s scary shit. Hopefully this can slow down some.

[+] [email protected] -16 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

BREAKING NEWS: Since the invention of calculators, less people using abacus!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What a dumb comparison. Calculators are just tools to do the same mechanical action as abaci, which were also just tools to speed up human mechanical actions of calculation.

Writing, drawing, research are creative, not mechanical, and offloading them to a tool is very different from offloading calculations to integrated circuits

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Most of what’s being offloaded to AI is boiler plate work. People underestimate how much of what we do every day is boiler plate, and the perfect workload to offload to allow humans to focus more on the creative stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

First off, no, not even boilerplate can be done incorrectly sometimes. Software that ingests words and outputs words can't check, say, official forms for correctness. Or test reports. You need a different type of reasoning for that.

And then, even if we assume that AI can do these tasks correctly, boilerplate isn't being just offloaded, it's being created. Sure, we've had bullshit generators before. But now our bullshit machines are faster, and spew out more believable bullshit. Google has been ruined by generated slop. That's work that wasn't performed before, doesn't improve our lives and yet is being done.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Generating boilerplate to get past the blank page phase is not the same as trying to make it check forms for correctness. That’s why I didn’t suggest it should be used for that, so I don’t know what use the strawman is to make an irrelevant point.

Many of you are very, very anti-AI. We get it. But that also leads to you having next to no experience with it, because you don’t practice enough to understand how to use it correctly, and it leads to y’all pulling nonsense criticisms out of your ass.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not a good analogy, except there is one interesting parallel. My students who overuse a calculator in stats tend to do fine on basic arithmetic but it does them a disservice when trying to do anything more elaborate. Granted, it should be able to follow PEDMAS but for whatever weird reason, it doesn't sometimes. And when there's a function that requires a sum and maybe multiple steps? Forget about it.

Similarly, GPT can make cliche copy writing, but good luck getting it to spit out anything complex. Trust me, I'm grading that drinble. So in that case, the analogy works.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

This. It's a tool, embrace it and learn the limitations....or get left behind and become obsolete. You won't be able to keep up with people that do use it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

dude you figuring out how to make the AI shit out something half-passable isn't making you clever and superior, it's just sad

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The invention of the torque wrench didn’t severely impede my ability to retrieve stored information, and everyone else’s, affecting me by proxy.

The tech four years ago was impressive but for me it’s only done two things since becoming widely available: thinned the soup of Internet fun things, and made some people, disproportionally executives at my work, abandon a solid third of their critical thinking skills.

I use AI models locally, to turn around little jokes for friends, you could say I’ve put more effort into machine learning tools than many daily AI users. And I’ll be the first to call the article described by OP as a true, shameful indictment of us as a species.

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