In the fast-paced world of education, “cheating with ChatGPT” triggers anxiety for all involved. As an AI language model, ChatGPT revolutionized our interaction with technology. However, it also led to false accusations against innocent students due to AI detection scanners’ false positives. In this post, we’ll examine five instances where Redditors were mistakenly accused of submitting ChatGPT-written work. Join us as we navigate the murky realm of academic enforcement, where human wit and AI-generated responses blur the lines.
Reddit user feetstreetseat faced trouble due to their formal tone and Grammarly Premium use, a common issue among high-achieving high schoolers.
“I (Grade 12) need help on what to do in this situation. My teacher used GPTZero, which detected parts of my paper as “AI written”. I write very formally, whilst also using grammarly premium. I’ve always been a high achieving student and I’m not sure why my teacher would think I cheated. I’ve told my teacher everything and he still doesn’t believe me. What should I do in this situation?!!”
Uh-oh! That can’t be fun. Thankfully, the student was able to make their teacher see reason:
“After school I talked to my teacher for about half an hour about how AI detectors are inaccurate, and how they shouldn’t be used to make verdicts on cheating and what not. I showed him that it read one of my past papers as written by AI, and that the creators even said themselves that they are not 100% accurate. I showed my drafts and showed how if I made a few grammar errors, I could trick the AI detector. My teacher apologized and I ended up getting a 95 on my paper.”
While it ended well, the experience was undoubtedly stressful, with no guarantee that other teachers would change their minds.
User The-Rice-Boi was able to see false positives in action on multiple AI detection scanners:
“My high school history teacher has accused me of using ChatGPT to complete an assignment. He claims he ran my paper through an AI detector (apparently the school is not allowed to disclose what detector they use) and it came back AI-generated. He didn’t even tell me what got flagged, but I suspect it may be the first paragraph because 2-3 online detectors said it was AI generated.”
This student had the bright idea of showing the teacher their version history in Google Docs, but unfortunately the default history level isn’t granular enough to provide solid proof. What’s worse, it turned out classmates actually were cheating:
“I have shown my version history on google docs to my teacher, but he still does not believe me because the version history at some points only accounted for chunks of 1 sentence, sometimes 2 sentences, so he believes it was copy and pasted from ChatGPT. Additionally, the teacher successfully caught a couple other students using the detector. Those students later admitted to him that they did use ChatGPT.”
This is something we ran into when developing our tool at Passed.AI, except we managed to get more granular and provide replay down to the individual character. Unfortunately, this is a very tricky thing to get to without using our extension.
User Grand_Grand5452 was getting frustrated with GPTZero providing their professor with a false positive result when another user, AdRepresentative2263, posted a false positive with the same AI detection scanner on a source we’re pretty sure wasn’t written by ChatGPT: the United States Constitution.
Solely relying on AI detection systems to identify cheating can lead to false accusations, causing stress and harm to hardworking students. At Passed.AI, we recognize the need for accurate identification of legitimate work and dishonest practices. That’s why we developed a powerful document audit and replay tool that work alongside AI detection to minimize false positives and protect dedicated students.
Discover more about the limitations of AI detection in our insightful blog post, “Why AI Detection Alone Isn’t Enough!“
