Somehow, I managed to survive 30 or so days of academic hell.
The hell is still with me, but I have a small breather in which I can now reflect on my inability to comprehend what is going on.
When I first heard the news that AI was a thing, I dismissed it. I saw the headlines, and I did not really pay attention to it. So also the institute where I teach and mark. We did not do anything about it, we did not teach ourselves what it was, how to use it, and so on. Until that first red flag we saw in our system, that was now geared to pick up the use of AI in student writings. At first, I saw it as a gimmick, I "accused" students of using AI (in a very academic and friendly in fact funny manner) and they all said one thing: "I did not use it". How could I really tell if they used AI or not? At that time, it was novel, no one really used it, and we kind of laughed it off.
Fast forward two and a half years. Academia (in my opinion) is literally crumbling. Okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration and I am also biased in terms of the field in which I teach. So, rather, the small section of academia in which I am a part of is crumbling, and no one is seemingly taking it seriously. In the two and a half years since the dawn of AI in student writing, my institution implemented a strict no internet policy in terms of research assignments. The students I am currently teaching, we decided, cannot be trusted with AI, and we as institute cannot accuse students of using AI (there is not "real proof"), so we just make them sit in a room without internet to write their "research essay". But the thing is, this is not research essays. This is a long exam question. Research requires one to search, to see what is written in academia, and to reflect on this in a slow process. Yes, not every student will do this, and the system worked. It fed the students that wanted to do research, like myself, and it spit out student that did not.
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I really loved research essays, and I am here today, just having finished a PhD, because of the essays I was given as an undergraduate student. Now, no student is really allowed to do research because lecturers cannot assess papers not written by the student, and we have no way of telling whether a student wrote that paper or not. In the past we had similar issues, how could we tell if a paper was really written by a student, but this problem is on steroids now. Now, we are unable to tell if any student wrote the paper, because AI detectors are unreliable, and institutions cannot accuse someone of doing something if they do not have proof.
But what is the answer? I am not sure. I just awoke from marking more than 200 papers in which I am pretty sure every single one was written by AI. Even though the AI detectors cannot pick it up, I have been marking for a couple of years in the AI era. I have also taught myself how to work with most of the AI models, so I am pretty sure when I say that I know for certain that I did not mark one paper that was written by a human. There are so many clear indications of this (which I am not going to go into now) but I spent two to three weeks of my life marking AI slop...
The realisation is somewhat sobering.
I assessed 200 AI written papers and I am not sure how I feel about this situation.
Academia in my corner of the world, relying on research essays, peer reviewed articles, and so on, is based on written works. Students don't want to write and read, and now they have basically found free ways to read and write papers without lifting a finger.
In my social group, there are so many stories of younger generation students who "brag" and celebrate that they managed to pass a module without ever studying, using AI models for everything. Students are now going to graduate without ever lifting a finger. Or they are going to graduate without having the knowledge of how to write a paper, how to engage with literature, because some institutes literally closed the door on that opportunity.
And I am still sitting here, wondering whether this situation will make us think differently. Because everyone is too afraid to speak about this situation, so we are all actually in the dark on this one...
*All of the photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300. All of the writing is my own, albeit inspired by a very tired brain and human that somehow just graded 200 computer AI slop.*