Hot off the heels of a study that showed most people can’t tell the difference between poetry written by AI and poetry written by some of the greatest poets in human history comes another study that says 94% of college writing done with AI goes undetected by professors.
College students are using AI to do damn near everything for them, from homework to exams, and it seems to be working out for them. They’re getting decent enough grades, the credits they need, and the degrees they’re looking for. Sure, there’s a risk the professor might be able to determine that a submitted work was written using AI, but according to research from the UK’s University of Reading, the odds of that happening are less than 10 percent.
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Of course, that appeals to the inherent sense of laziness we all carry within us, but extrapolate that for a second. Think about all of the nurses and engineers and doctors and architects and whoever else out there is getting degrees that they technically didn’t earn by submitting work that they didn’t write.
It wouldn’t all be surprising if we faced a future qualification crisis, where educational institutions hand out degrees to people who are not fully qualified for their careers.
The key here is that humans have a hard time determining whether or not a student’s writing is really an AI chatbot’s writing. AI writing detection systems that some schools employ, like one called Turnitin, actually do a spectacular job of figuring it out.
A different study, published in 2023, found that AI writing detectors like Turnitin can catch up to 91% of AI-generated papers while humans catch only 54.5%. This is especially troublesome considering that the UK study found that 83.4% of AI submissions received better grades than human ones.
The AI is doing all the work and the humans are reaping all the credit. None of this would be so much of a problem if colleges in the UK used AI writing detection software but they just don’t for whatever reason.
